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Researchers Isolate the "Smell of Human Death"

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: September 23rd, 2015, 2:00am UTC

sciencehabit writes: In the wake California's forest fires, cadaver dogs had to distinguish between burning homes, charred forest, and even other dead animals to pick up the unique scent of human victims. A new study reveals how they might have done it: Decomposing humans seem to release a unique chemical cocktail, one that scientists might be able to use to better train cadaver dogs and even develop machines that could do the same job.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Researchers+Isolate+the+%22Smell+of+Human+Death%22%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1Feglcl"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F09%2F22%2F228232%2Fresearchers-isolate-the-smell-of-human-death%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/09/22/228232/researchers-isolate-the-smell-of-human-death?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/09/22/228232/researchers-isolate-the-smell-of-human-death?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/HuyAZTnQPY0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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