New
By Dr. Becker
Inside your nose are about 6 million olfactory receptors that allow you to recognize thousands of different smells.1 It sounds like a lot, until you realize that inside your dog’s nose there are up to 300 million such receptors.
While you can detect certain odors in parts per billion, a dog can
detect them in parts per trillion. Plus, your dog has a part of his
brain devoted to analyzing smells that’s about 40 times larger,
proportionally, than the same area in your brain.2
This explains why a dog’s sense of smell is anywhere from 10,000 to
100,000 times more acute than your own, and also why their sense of
smell can be described as nothing short of amazing. As reported by NOVA scienceNOW:3
“…in her book Inside of a Dog, Alexandra
Horowitz, a dog-cognition researcher at Barnard College, writes that
while we might notice if our coffee has had a teaspoon of sugar added to
it, a dog could detect a teaspoon of sugar in a million gallons of
water, or two Olympic-sized pools worth.
Another dog scientist likened their ability to catching a whiff of one rotten apple in two million barrels.”
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Dogs
can use their noses to detect hard drives, thumb drives, and other
computer gear, and police are now using these specially trained
hard-drive-sniffing dogs in the fight against child pornography
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DVD-sniffing
dogs have been used to track down massive DVD counterfeiting operations
in Southeast Asia, finding not only millions of pirated discs but also
burner towers used to produce them
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Dogs
can detect subtle differences in the breath, urine, skin, blood, and
feces of cancer patients, allowing them to detect certain cancers with
up to 97 percent accuracy
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A
dog’s sense of smell is anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 times more acute
than your own, and can detect odors in parts per trillion
