Sniffing things too small to see

You and I can smell things like pizza and chicken soup. But can you tell the difference between chicken soup with carrots and without carrots? How good is your sense of smell? -- Can you smell a termite? How about a bedbug?

Termites and bedbugs both release distinctive smells in the form of molecules that are released into the air. Normally, we wouldn't be able to smell this unless there was a major infestation. But dogs can!

At the University of Florida, researchers are training dogs to detect termites and bedbugs. Termites cause about $5 billion in damages every year in the U.S. and bedbug infestations have gone up 71% in the past 5 years. The dogs are trained using a combination of the U.S. Customs method and a food-reward system, and thus far, have an 96% accuracy rate with false positives of less than 3%.

Source: University of Florida
Image Source: Advanced K9 Detectives