But what does Osama bin-Laden smell like?? A camel, for escaping on one over the mountains into Pakistan like Hannibal on his elephants over the Alps? Gunpowder, for getting a close shave from the daisy-cutters (super bombs) that killed all the daisies but spared this weed? Irish Spring soap—I just had a psychic flash of Osama taking a shower and whistling "I’m Singing In the Rain." ?

Hot on the scent of a suspected terrorist? Darpa — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — hopes to give literal meaning to the phrase. It wants someone to develop a sniffing machine that can detect individuals by their body odor.

The idea is not as rank as it may seem. Dogs are said, at least by dog handlers, to recognize the scents of individual people. Researchers have found that mice can detect from body odor and urine how closely they are related to one another, a useful way to avoid inbreeding. So Darpa, the grand patron of exotic military arts (not everything it does works, but it did have a hand in creating the precursor of the Internet), is soliciting "innovative proposals to (1) determine whether genetically-determined odortypes can be used to identify specific individuals, and if so (2) to develop the science and enabling technology for detecting and identifying specific individuals by such odortypes."

With the high-tech identification industry going into full gear with machines that recognize fingerprints and scan the iris, why is Darpa messing with something as old-fashioned as B.O.? Dr. Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Sense Center in Philadelphia, notes that odors can be detected through just a handful of molecules. Also, unlike sight and sound, the smells from a fugitive can linger for hours or days.

—Nicholas Wade, "On the Scent of Terrorists," The New York Times, January 5, 2003

Can you imagine having the sensitivity of a mouse and asking your date to piss in a jar so you can sniff it before you take him/her home for... ?

Ah, this initiative reminds me of a favorite movie, Scent of A Woman, with Al Pacino.

Could we turn the gun of a potential terrorist-sniffing device into a plowshare of aromatic matchmaking?

So, what are you sniffing or would like to be sniffing today?