Advances in artificial intelligence, bioengineering and synthetic biology are powering a new breed of odor sensors, some using living cells.

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two Decembers ago, Erin Pettit layered up, slapped on goggles, cued up an audio book, and went on a hike--across Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. Behind her, she dragged a sled loaded with a ground-penetrating radar, which fired pulses through a thousand feet of ice and analyzed the radio waves that bounced off the seawater below, thus building a detailed image of the glacier beneath her feet. Pettit--a glaciologist and climate scientist at Oregon State University--hiked alone through the snow, sometimes eschewing headphones for the absolute auditory stillness of the most remote landscape on Earth. "It was actually kind of an amazing, meditative field season," she says, "I just bundled up, I went out there and pulled my sled, and just walked for miles and miles."

Two Decembers ago, Erin Pettit layered up, slapped on goggles, cued up an audio book, and went on a hike--across Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. Behind her, she dragged a sled loaded with a ground-penetrating radar, which fired pulses through a thousand feet of ice and analyzed the radio waves that bounced off the seawater below, thus building a detailed image of the glacier beneath her feet. Pettit--a glaciologist and climate scientist at Oregon State University--hiked alone through the snow, sometimes eschewing headphones for the absolute auditory stillness of the most remote landscape on Earth. "It was actually kind of an amazing, meditative field season," she says, "I just bundled up, I went out there and pulled my sled, and just walked for miles and miles." In case you were worried, her colleagues always knew where Pettit was; every so often someone would roll out on a snow machine to bring her supplies or to swap out the radar's battery.

U.S. officials called it a "righteous strike." It was the last drone strike before the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and American officials claimed they stopped an ISIS bomb that posed an imminent threat to the Kabul airport. Turns out though that the strike appears to have killed a worker for a U.S. aid group and there are indications there were no explosives in the vehicle that was hit, according to investigations by the New York Times and Washington Post. In all, 10 civilians appeared to have been killed in the Aug. 29 strike, including seven children. They were all members of the same extended family.

This has not been shown in public. And no, it does not make coffee. Deep in the heart of the 17,000 attendees at Slush – the insanely busy, loud and dark conference in Helsinki – I found Karsa.fi a small stand with a big claim; they keep bombs off planes. Plane travel – while safer than it has ever been is still a concern for those in the planes as those on the ground. Terrorism – or rather fear of it – is at record levels (despite figures that suggest a decline in major incidents) so Karsa.fi's