Now the Machines Are Learning How to Smell

Google has its own perfume--or at least one team of the company's researchers does. Crafted under the guidance of expert French perfumers, the mixture has notes of vanilla, jasmine, melon, and strawberries. "It wasn't half bad," says Alex Wiltschko, who keeps a vial of the perfume in his kitchen. Google's not marketing that scent anytime soon, but it is sticking its nose into yet another aspect of our lives: smell. On Thursday, researchers at Google Brain released a paper on the preprint site Arxiv showing how they trained a set of machine-learning algorithms to predict molecules' smell based on their structures.