Clare Townhill

Jerry and the ball machine

When dogs and their technologically minded owners get together. Joyful.

Doggy iD

Sniftag: Tails told, friends made. This really is very lovely. It's a Nike iD for dogs and their owners combined with an introduction service under the pretence of building social networks of four-legged friends. Genius.

From one snif to another. New research on what makes dogs noses so brilliant:

'Snot makes dogs supersleuths'

DOGS' extraordinary ability to sniff out anything from cocaine to cancer turns out to owe much to the gunk inside their nose.

Dogs have many more nerve cells in their nasal cavities than we do and a wider variety of receptors to latch on to odour molecules. Now a team led by Brent Craven of Pennsylvania State University in University Park has shown that the complex network of snot-coated tubes in a dog's nose also "pre-sorts" smells, which may make it easier for the brain to identify them.

Before odour molecules can reach smell receptors, they must get through a layer of mucus - and some molecules are absorbed quicker than others. To find out how this might affect smell perception, Craven's team used MRI images of a dog's nasal airways to develop computer models of how air travels along them. The team found that different molecules are first picked up at different points in the airway network.

Until now, research has focused on how receptors pick up different chemicals. "We've shown that the sorting out of the different odorants before they even get to the receptors is also important," says Craven. The team presented its results this week at a meeting of the American Physical Society's division of fluid dynamics in San Antonio, Texas.