There's just nothing like that "new car smell," many people believe. There is a health angle to consider, though. A recent study by the Beijing Institute of Technology and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, found that the cabin of a new vehicle contained 20 common "volatile organic compounds" (VOCs), which could potentially contain cancer-causing agents. The Environmental Protection Agency defines VOCs as "compounds that have a high vapor pressure and low water solubility," which are found in paints, pharmaceuticals and petroleum fuels. In particular, the study found high levels of formaldehyde (34.9%) and acetaldehyde (60.5%) inside a new car.

Fusarium circinatum, a fungal pathogen deadly to many Pinus species, can cause significant economic and ecological losses, especially if it were to become more widely established in Europe. Early detection tools with high-throughput capacity can increase our readiness to implement mitigation actions against new incursions. This study sought to develop a disease detection method based on volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions to detect F. circinatum on different Pinus species. The complete pipeline applied here, entailing gas chromatography—mass spectrometry of VOCs, automated data analysis and machine learning, distinguished diseased from healthy seedlings of Pinus sylvestris and Pinus radiata. In P. radiata, this distinction was possible even before the seedlings became visibly symptomatic, suggesting the possibility for this method to identify latently infected, yet healthy looking plants. Pinus pinea, which is known to be relatively resistant to F. circinatum, remained asymptomatic and showed no changes in VOCs over 28 days. In a separate analysis of in vitro VOCs collected from different species of Fusarium, we showed that even closely related Fusarium spp. can be readily distinguished based on their VOC profiles. The results further substantiate the potential for volatilomics to be used for early disease detection and diagnostic recognition.

For dog lovers, the idea of friendly canines as living, breathing, tail-wagging cancer detectors is a hopeful one. Not only do dogs conjure smiles, but their known olfactory abilities would offer a strange contrast to the sterile medical exam rooms many find dreadful: brushed steel countertops, white lab coats, buttercup walls, and the penetrating smell of disinfectants. But if dogs have already shown the ability to detect cancer on human breath or urine, researchers have now found one better: Ants could be a more cost-effective means of harnessing the same super-sniffing abilities of their distant cousin canines to help detect cancer and other illnesses in humans. We may eventually be able to use both dogs and ants to train artificial intelligence-powered devices to do the same thing. "Insects have a life that is much shorter than that of mammals. They have to learn fast," says Patrizia d'Ettorre, an expert in ant behavior at University Paris 13 in France.

There's a reason so much of the produce sold in the grocery store often tastes like cardboard. Actually, there are several reasons. Most of them stem from the fact that tastiness is far down on the list of what the food industry encourages plant breeders to prioritize when developing new varieties -- called "cultivars" -- of produce. When they do want to focus on taste, breeders don't have good tools for quickly sampling the fruit from thousands of cultivars. In a surprising new paper, researchers at the University of Florida describe a new method for "tasting" produce based on its chemical profile.

The HealthProtect 7410i is a sizeable unit, measuring more than two feet tall and weighing nearly 28 pounds. Its upright design makes it a bit awkward to move around, but two wheels on the back of the unit let you drag it like a vacuum cleaner, albeit this is a bit awkward. Smart features aside, one of the unit's biggest selling points is its ventilation design. While the typical high-end air purifier draws dirty air in through the bottom and ejects filtered air through the top, the HealthProtect pulls air in from the sides of the device, passes it through a unique V-shaped pair of filters, then ejects it via outlets positioned all around the device. Blueair's V-shaped filter pair has an embedded RFID chip that tracks its use and sends a message to the app when it's time for a replacement.

Dogs that can smell prostate cancer could inspire'robotic noses' to sniff out the disease, in a technique dubbed'machine olfaction', a new study reveals. In a pilot study, British and US researchers trained dogs to detect aggressive prostate cancer from people's urine samples. Dogs have an extremely sensitive sense of smell and can pick up on'volatile organic compounds' (VOCs) released during the early stages of many cancers. The scientists then used the data to create an artificial neural network that could detect the cancer-specific chemicals that the dogs could smell. The hope is that the dogs' performance can eventually be replicated and used in technology such as an app on a smartphone.

Imagine being able to know if you have Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, liver failure, Crohn's diseases, pulmonary hypertension, chronic kidney disease, or any number of cancers based on a simple, non-invasive test of your breath. Breath analyzers to detect alcohol have been around for well over half a century--why not apply the same concept to detect diseases? A global team of scientists from universities in Israel, France, Latvia, China and the United States have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system to detect 17 diseases from exhaled breath with 86 percent accuracy. The research team led by Professor Hassam Haick of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology collected breath samples from 1404 subjects with either no disease (healthy control) or one of 17 different diseases. The disease conditions include lung cancer, colorectal cancer, head and neck cancer, ovarian cancer, bladder cancer, prostate cancer, kidney cancer, gastric cancer, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, idiopathic Parkinson's, atypical Parkinson ISM, multiple sclerosis, pulmonary hypertension, pre-eclampsia toxemia, and chronic kidney disease.