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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

China has awarded a prestigious “Pineapple Prize” to a fart-detector [theregister.co.uk].

The Pineapple Prizes are organised by Guokr.com, a Chinese popular science publication that named the award after the fruit which in China is said to be so ugly that only the brave and curious would explore its delicious interior. The prizes therefore look for discoveries that are both useful and amusing.

This year that approach saw Li Jigong of Tianjin University take out the Physics prize for a device Chinese state media says “not only solves the mystery of who farted, but provides a way to locate the source of any odor through the complex dynamics of air.”

A spot of research suggests there's actually some serious work behind this one, as Jigong is co-author of a paper titled Odor source localization using a mobile robot in outdoor airflow environments with a particle filter algorithm [acm.org].

To become standard equipment in elevators everywhere?

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