China's "Human Sniffers" Tasked With Finding Potentially Hazardous Gas Emissions
Beijing's Air Quality Problem Kevin Dooley via Wikimedia Today in truly odd jobs: China is apparently hiring "human sniffers" to act as living, breathing sensors to detect potentially unhealthy gases around waste and sewage treatment plants. In fact, Beijing has been doing this for years. China's rapid urbanization in recent decades has resulted in the construction of many new treatment facilities for waste and sewage that can emit unhealthy and offensive vapors into the air, and the state has dealt with this via a small army of human smell detectors. These "human sniffers" specialize. Some are trained to detect hazardous odors emanating from sewage treatment plants, others from farms or stockyards or municipal dumps. Technicians collect air samples from these places and bring them to the lab, where the olfactory experts (generally a panel of six) are each presented with three bags: one filled with the sample and two with normal...