Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Nebula
Pretty photograph.
The Squid Nebula is shown in blue, indicating doubly ionized oxygen—which is when you ionize your oxygen once and then ionize it again just to make sure. (In all seriousness, it likely indicates a low-mass star nearing the end of its life).
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
vas pup • November 24, 2023 6:13 PM
The electronic noses designed to prevent food poisoning
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67354443
“The human nose and its ability to smell is an amazing thing.
Each nose has around 400 scent receptors that are said to be able to detect around one trillion different odours.
To replicate such a level of sensory expertise in scientific equipment is a
daunting challenge.
Yet thanks to recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), the latest
electronic noses – high-tech sensors that can detect and report specific smells – are quickly improving their levels of speed and accuracy.
Their proponents say that they can transform food safety.
Common types of potentially deadly foodborne bacteria are salmonella and E. Coli.
Both of these have their own “electronic personality”, says Prof Raz Jelinek, the co-developer of an e-nose called Sensifi, and a professor of chemistry at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel. “They have their own electrical signal.”
The e-noses made by the Israeli company of the same name contain electrodes that are coated with nanoparticles of carbon. They detect the smells or volatile organic compounds (VOC) given off by bacteria.
Different strains of bacteria produce a different VOC fingerprint, which in turn creates a different electric signal in the Sensifi machine. This is then recorded by an AI software system, which checks it against its ever-growing database, and notifies the user. Sensifi, which launched earlier this year, hopes that it can transform the fight against infection in the food industry. Its chief executive Modi Peled says that in most cases food producers currently have to send samples off to a laboratory for testing, and then wait a number of days for the results to come back.
By contrast, Sensifi’s e-noses can be used on site by the food firms themselves, and are said to give their results in less than one hour. It hasn’t released a price for its machines, but says they will be “low cost”. The firm instead intends to make most of its money from subscription fees.
At German firm NTT Data Business Solutions it had a novel way to help train the AI that powers the e-nose it is developing – coffee.
In one test, technicians spent three days putting instant coffee powder next to the AI’s sensors. The AI then had to identify one of three options – good coffee, bad coffee (coffee that had been laced with vinegar), and no coffee at all.
“An odor isn’t just a gas, it is a unique combination of gases,” says Adrian Kostrz, the firm’s innovation manager. “And very often there are variations or very small differences in the way things smell.”
In New Zealand, a company called Scentian Bio, says it has copied the antennae of insects to develop its “biosensors”. This has seen it replicate insect proteins, and include them in its scent sensors.
Andrew Kralicek, founder and chief technology officer of the firm, says that as a result of this biotechnology its sensors are “thousands of times more sensitive than a dog’s nose”.
!!!He adds: “We can use this biosensor-based tech virtually everywhere – in food and flavor quality control, food pathogen detection, non-invasive rapid
disease diagnosis, sustainable farming, and environmental and wellness monitoring.”
Applications for security are obvious.