Computer chip that senses smell could save money, reduce waste

A Massachusetts-based startup has given computers the sense to smell spoiling food. 

|
AP
This Sept. 10, 2014 file photo shows bunches of Chiquita brand bananas for sale at a grocery store in Zelienople, Pa.

Scientists have built computers that can play chess, drive a car, and even predict educational outcomes. And now, they've made one that can tell if your food is about to go bad.

A Massachusetts-based startup called C2Sense, using research conducted at MIT, has created what they call “disruptive gas sensing technologies” that will be used to sniff out rotting food, Wired reports.

Early detection of spoilage is critical to keeping other foods in a container from going bad. Take fruit for instance: as a piece of fruit ripens, it releases a gas called ethylene, which accelerates the ripening of nearby fruits, prompting them to release even more ethylene, quickly spoiling, as the saying goes, the whole barrel.

The same process occurs with amines released by bad meat. The ability to spot these chemicals before they take effect can reduce waste and save money; C2Sense co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Jan Schnorr told Wired.

Dr. Schnorr said C2Sense can detect ethylene in trace amounts too small for humans to smell, and it can also sense amines and two other unspecified gases. Schnorr told Wired.com C2Sense uses a new material that chemically reacts to ethylene as a resistor in a small electrical circuit. When ethylene levels rise, the material’s current decreases, triggering an alarm.

Some smoke detectors and carbon monoxide alarms work the same way: their sensors triggered by changes in electrical current brought on by chemical reactions caused by these unwanted chemicals and particulates.

In fact, C2Sense is not the first ethylene sensor, though, available options are costly and unreliable and implementation requires expertise, Schnorr noted in a 2013 grant application, submitted to the National Science Foundation which awarded him $145,500 to begin research the following year.

Shnorr told Wired that C2Sense has just received a $350,000 grant from Breakout Labs, a philanthropic organization created by Peter Thiel – a co-founder of Pay-Pal who was also an early investor in Facebook – that seeks to help scientists create startups. Shnorr says his company hopes to make sensor chips cheap enough to be built into food packaging that could be scanned with smartphones, which would provide users with a “freshness reading.”

In the grant application to NSF, Schnorr noted the “broader impact/commercial potential” of C2Sense “is the reduction of produce wasted by spoilage” that results in losses of approximately $20-billion annually.

“Worldwide we have about 1.3-billion tonnes of food-waste every year,” Schnorr says in a YouTube video, “and about 8 to 15-percent of that is due to spoilage. So it’s a huge problem.” Schnorr said people need to “become smarter about how we handle that.”

A recent study from the National Resources Defense Council found that 40-percent of food in the United States goes uneaten, which equates to throwing away $165 billion each year. The report noted “the uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills as the single largest component of U.S. municipal solid waste where it accounts for a large portion of U.S. methane emissions.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Computer chip that senses smell could save money, reduce waste
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2015/1108/Computer-chip-that-senses-smell-could-save-money-reduce-waste
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe