The oldest technology for detecting trace amounts of materials remains the best, writes Haley Cohen Gilliland.Furry friends: For nearly as long as armies have fought one another, they have enlisted animals to help. Yet while horses are largely gone from modern armies, dogs are not. As of 2016, the US military counted over 1,740 military working dogs among its ranks, mostly German shepherds and Belgian Malinois.
What they do: The military heavily relies on dogs to sniff out explosives. A dog’s sense of smell is estimated to be 10,000 to 100,000 times stronger than the average human’s. Billions of dollars’ worth of research on artificial detectors have yet to produce anything better.
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