This is a technology breakthrough which would be as important as getting camera lens onto cell phones. Scientists in Tokyo have managed to create a cell phone which can smell scents and more importantly, replicate the exact thing later on. It adds a whole new dimension to the phrase "sights and sounds" which can now be expanded to say "sights, sounds and smells" since the handset would be able to have a video recording which would even incorporate the smells of a place.

Based on microchips, each microchip contains a sensor which can detect different traces in an odour. Engineers have already build a system that can record apples, oranges, melons and bananas and claim that these sensors can come up with thousands of combinations. Further benefits include those such as finding out from a smell of a wound (since these smells would be electronically encoded, they can be transmitted and reproduced thousands of miles away) whether it is infected. More uses need only be dreamt up with this technology. The proportions of each odour are carefully noted by the microchips and when the 'recording' is played back they recreate them from 96 manmade chemicals.

Up to now, smell generators used in cinemas or shops simply pump out pre-prepared odours. The invention has been developed by a team at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, led by Pambuk Somboon. He told the journal New Scientist: 'We can even tell a green apple from a red apple just by its smell'.

[via DailyMail]