🔶 Invention of a new technology that transmits smell through the Internet.

Since the advent of the Internet, people can easily share images and sounds digitally.

With the use of billions of smartphones worldwide, this work has become normal for years and it no longer seems surprising.

Now researchers have unveiled new technology that uses an electronic nose to detect specific smells, such as the distinct aroma of coffee, and then commands a small, wearable device elsewhere to release aromatic molecules that match that smell.

This digital communication can be made at any distance, from two sides of a room to two points on either side of the world.

Chunyu Yang, a doctoral student in materials science and engineering at Ohio State University, told Reuters that the idea behind the technology is to add scent to the video and audio information we already share to make those experiences more engaging. Researchers have named this new breakthrough in digital smell technology "Centronic."

In this technology, detailed in an article in the journal Science Advances, a machine learning model classifies the smells that the electronic nose is trained to detect: beer, cake, coffee, orange and red wine.

This technology actually uses an online platform to transmit odor information to an odor-producing device.

This device then releases aromatics to recreate the scent at the receiving location. However, according to the scientists, the aromatic molecules themselves are not transmitted through the Internet.

According to them, this electronic nose device is about 15 cm in diameter and is portable, although this device is not intended to be worn.

Currently, the electronic nose only recognizes these five smells. "We chose these odors because familiar and everyday odors have different olfactory properties and are therefore good examples to demonstrate the system's performance," says Young. "We have not yet expanded the scope of identification beyond these categories."