Smelly Fish and Electronic Noses

Seafood is good when it is fresh. Old seafood can taste very bad and in some cases might even make you sick. Fishy smelling seafood is not always rotten. Within a few hours after harvesting a sea-dwelling creature, it can start breaking down and out comes that fishy odor. Most of us can detect the really nasty-smelling fish but experts are needed to detect seafoods that are labeled fresh but are really days old. Those experts are getting old in the United States. Only about 30 people can do this and they are closing in on retirement. To replace these experts, computer engineers have developed seafood sniffing computers (I call them electronic noses).

One engineer is working on a way to even detect seafood that may be harmful to those who eat it. Bacteria, as a result of growing, give off certain compounds that cannot be detected by our noses. However, an electronic nose could be tuned to detect these odors. Sometimes computers are a real headache and actually take up too much time. But this time the computer age may result in electronic noses that could ensure our seafood is fresh and free of hazardous bacterial contamination. For more power go to the ScienceNewsOnline article that gave me the idea for this article.

Take Care and Think Microbiologically!

Power Points: Did you know that viruses are the most common cause of sore throats?  Did you know that viruses are also the most common cause of the common cold?

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