Word: cyrano
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...senses, is being digitized the way sight and sound have been. The basics of what makes a smell can be captured molecularly and expressed digitally on a chip at a reasonable price. Companies like DigiScents of Oakland, Calif., and Ambryx of La Jolla, Calif., have already developed digital odors. Cyrano Sciences of Pasadena, Calif., is developing medical-diagnostics technology that can "smell" diseases...
...tiny sniffers are beginning to live up to their moniker. Today e-noses are being tested for everything from disease detection to disaster prevention, and lower-priced models are starting to come on the market--including an $8,000 device called the Cyranose 320 being introduced this week by Cyrano Sciences of Pasadena, Calif...
...noses, chemical sensors replace the body's cellular receptors, and microprocessors substitute for the brain. "What limits these devices is how well the sensors are doing," explains Nathan Lewis, the Caltech chemist who helped invent the sensor technology licensed by Cyrano and who has since continued his research independently. He compares the power of e-noses to the resolution of computer monitors: "Are you seeing the world in eight shades of gray or in 16 million colors...
...Cyrano's enthusiastic (and aptly named) ceo Steven Sunshine is to be believed, Cyranose is "seeing" in Technicolor. When properly trained, its 32-sensor Nose-Chip[TM] can sniff a particular variety of rice and tell you not only which one it is but also where it was grown. Does it smell as well as we do? Yes and no. It has trouble detecting some things to which human noses are acutely attuned--such as the stench of rotting eggs--but it can be trained to pick up others most people would never notice. There are limits, however...
Authors represented in the displays include Dante Alighieri, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Moore, Cyrano de Bergerac, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Blake, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Ray Bradbury, Issac Asimov, Alexander Pope and Alfred Lord Tennyson...