Word: sniffers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1970
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pollution code brought a fresh breeze of hope. Odors injurious to the public welfare were outlawed; the definition of welfare included reasonable enjoyment of life and property. To enforce the code, alas, the city acquired a Scentometer. The device is a plastic box that contains a sensitive mechanical sniffer through which an inspector breathes. This is a scientific means, supposedly, for calibrating stink. But for the past eleven months the Scentometer has gasped through 1,100 tests of the air around Hopfenmaier's and found it legally tolerable. The machine is contradicted by most noses in town...
...enough effort to explain the causes of dissatisfaction. As a result, when a black reporter for a white-controlled news organization goes into a black community, hostility toward his employer sometimes rubs off on him. He may be regarded, in the phrase of some black newsmen, as a "Ghetto Sniffer," an Uncle Tom who has sold out to the "honky" press...
...from scratch. Much of the know-how has already been accumulated by a Chicago lab called the Olfactronics and Odor Science Center, part of the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute. Under a $300,000 grant from the Federal Aviation Administration, the smell researchers have developed a prototype "bomb sniffer" that scents incriminating odors with all the dispatch of a highly trained bloodhound. In fact, the system has so impressed the Israelis that they have adapted and improved the design for their own harassed airliners, though they have not officially acknowledged the use of such a detector...
Golden Tube. The target of the chromatographic detective work performed by the bomb sniffer is the vapor from a chemical called ethylene glycol dinitrate (EGDN), one of the principal components of emissions given off by dynamite. With the aid of a small internal fan, the detector samples air in the vicinity of a suspect object and passes the vapors over a modern equivalent of Tsvett's limestone-a rough gold-plated copper surface that has a special affinity for EGDN. As the molecules adhere to it, their concentration increases. The special surface is then heated...