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A 40-year-old Taiwanese company says it’s invented the “world’s first” commercially available AI nose, which it is debuting this week at SEMICON. Uses include detecting illness in humans in healthcare settings, boosting safety in factories, and improving chip yields in semiconductor fabs, where the slightest impurities can ruin millions of dollars of expensive processors.

Imagine today’s emerging humanoid robots with functioning noses. Or Roomba-like vacuums that can sense safety factors while they clean our homes. Or just smarter smoke alarms and radon detectors that also check for dozens of different contaminants.

The “AI Nose” from Ainos starts with tiny micro-electro-mechanical sensor arrays that mechanically “sniff” the air. The technology then uses a proprietary Smell Language Model – think SLM versus typical AI LLMs like ChatGPT – to analyze the scent signature.

Smell is a “new category in industrial sensing,” says Ainos CEO Eddy Tsai.

Ainos’ SLM has been trained on a scent dataset collected over 13 years, the company says, and the mechanical nose can detect volatile organic compounds down to the parts-per-billion range. The “SLM” then translates that physical data into a “Smell ID,” an indexable, machine-readable representation of scent patterns.

(Interestingly, dogs can identify smells at the parts-per-trillion level: an order of magnitude better.)

The first market the AI nose is aimed at is the semiconductor industry, which is a massive $115 billion industry in Taiwan. TSMC, or the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, commands around 50% of global market share in advanced semiconductors all by itself.

Even tiny chemical leaks in semiconductor fabs can cause costly yield losses or safety hazards, so that’s a potentially lucrative market.

The company is also targeting hospital infection control, environmental monitoring, and food quality assurance. Ainos also highlights flexible detection ranges, suggesting that future modules could be tailored for detecting everything from ammonia in clean rooms to methane in energy facilities. That could broaden AI Nose’s market well beyond chips and into environmental compliance, agriculture, and municipal infrastructure.

Ainos isn’t alone in the artificial nose business.

There’s also Noze, which has an investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Canaery, which is focused on port and shipping safety, and Koniku, which says it is using biological neurons to for applications like airport security, military sensing purposes, and agriculture.

Universities, startups, and even DARPA have experimented with digital noses, often focusing on explosives detection, disease diagnosis through breath, or environmental sensing.

To date, most efforts remain niche, experimental, or lab-bound.

Eventually, however, some company will crack this market, the sensors will rapidly come down in price, and we’ll be able to easily access much more detailed information about the safety and status of our homes and factories.

Or, perhaps, we can just use our canine friends.

When the weather turns hot, it can be hard to say no to a delicious ice cream or a refreshing cold drink.

But scientists now warn that our summer indulgences could be part of a much more serious problem.

According to new research, our warming climate threatens to make us all obese.

Researchers found that, as the weather gets warmer, people reach for sugar-rich foods like fizzy drinks, juice, and frozen desserts.

Hot weather increases sweating and therefore how much people need to drink to stay hydrated. 

But rather than opting for healthy water, researchers found that people often go with an unhealthy sugary alternative.

Between 12°C and 30°C (54-86°F), people consume 0.7 grams more sugar every day for each degree warmer it gets.

That means people may eat over two teaspoons more sugar when it’s 25°C (77°F), compared to when it is 12°C (54°F).

Previous studies have shown that the warming climate is likely to have a serious impact on public health.

However, scientists’ understanding of how this might affect our diets is much more limited.

Lead researcher Dr Pan He, of Cardiff University, told The Daily Mail that hotter weather drives sugar intake for two main reasons. 

She says: ‘First, higher temperature would facilitate metabolism and lead to higher demand of hydration. If one is used to using sweetened beverages to hydrate themselves, then this would become the problem.

‘Second, one may use frozen food and drinks to physically cool down, and many of these products have added sugar, such as frozen yoghurt and ice cream.’

To study this potential connection, in a study published in Nature Climate Change, an international team of researchers collected US household purchasing data from 2004 to 2019.

The researchers then compared the amount of sugar in Americans’ shopping to local weather conditions, including temperature, wind speed, and humidity.

This revealed that there was a strong connection between daily temperature and the quantity of sugar consumed.

The researchers compared 15 years of US household purchasing data against local meteorological conditions. They found that, between 12°C and 30°C (54-86°F), people consume 0.7 grams more sugar every day for each degree warmer it gets

The researchers say that warm weather increases people’s hydration needs. For those who are accustomed to drinking sweetened drinks, this leads to increased sugar consumption. Pictured: Sunbathers on Brighton Beach during the summer heatwave on August 12 

However, Dr He says she was surprised to find that this increase was sharpest at relatively mild temperatures.

Dr He says: ‘You don’t even need hot weather for people to take more sugar.’

Sugar consumption steeply increases with temperature between 12°C and 30°C (54-86°F), with a ‘marked escalation in consumption’ occurring at 20°C.

The increase was most rapid between 24°C and 30°C (75-86°F), but sugar consumption continues to climb even at temperatures about 30°C.

If the global heating trend continues, Dr He and her co-authors predict that the average American could consume 2.99 grams more sugar every day by 2095.

It is worth noting that this would be the case for a fairly extreme, but not impossible, heating scenario of 5°C (9°F) above the pre-industrial average.

However, these patterns show that the risks of obesity and other diet-related health conditions are likely to become worse as climate change continues to warm the planet.

As the data suggests, these effects would be most pronounced among the poor and less educated, who already tend to consume more sugar on average.

By 2095, if the climate continues to heat at current rates, the average person might consume up to 2.99 grams of extra sugar every day due to the effects of global warming 

This follows the UK’s hottest summer on record, with temperatures hitting an average of 16.1°C (61°F). Scientists say these record-breaking conditions were made 70 times more likely due to climate change 

The study found that those with lower levels of education and lower income tend to increase their sugar consumption faster as the heat rises.

As the health impacts of climate change continue to mount, this suggests that it is the least well-off in society who once again bear the brunt of the harm.

Study co-author Dr Duo Chan, of the University of Southampton, told Daily Mail: ‘So far, the health impact of climate change has been described mainly in terms of how extreme heat can cause heat stroke, which occurs on short time scales.

‘On the other end of the spectrum, what we find is the slower, long-term influence of temperature change, acting through diet.’

Although Dr Chan says the results – that people have more sweet drinks when it is hot – were not surprising, the quality of the data was an important step forward.

He says: ‘To me, the main contribution of this work is that it uses new high-resolution purchasing data to quantify this relationship.

‘This provides concrete evidence for an intuitive argument and highlights a neglected perspective on the health burden of climate change.’

The PlayStation 5 turns five years old in November, and talk about the yet-to-be-announced PS6 has begun picking up lately. One idea that the proposed successor console could reportedly adopt from the current PlayStation hardware generation is a detachable disc drive.

According to Insider Gaming, having a detachable disc drive will allow Sony to reduce production and shipping costs of the PS6. This is also seen as a way to protect the company during “uncertain times”, likely a reference to ongoing turbulence in the market brought on by US president Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Essentially, this will allow consumers to choose between either a PS6 with a disc drive–a more traditional option–or a cheaper digital model that they can later upgrade with the add-on. In comparison, the PS5 console first launched with either a built-in disc drive or an all-digital model, and people who bought the more affordable console had no option for upgrading at the time with an add-on accessory. This changed when the slimmer PS5 console revision was introduced, and last year’s launch of the PS5 Pro did not include a disc drive at all–although one can still be attached to it.

Several years into the current console generation, hardware has only gotten more expensive over time. In Europe, the PS5 Digital Edition has reportedly been hit with shrinkflation as the internal SSD is being reduced from 1TB to 825GB. Earlier this year, Sony announced price increases for Digital and Standard Edition PS5 consoles across Europe, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, and in August, the price of all PS5 console models in the US increased by $50 due to a “challenging economic environment” Sony said at the time.

One other thing that we do know about Sony’s next console is that the company will continue to rely on hardware over cloud technology. Back in June, Sony president and CEO Hideaki Nishino said that while cloud gaming continues to progress, consumers still prefer the “local execution” of games that comes from physical media or content downloaded directly to the console itself.