Admittedly it's been a while since I was in Pittsburgh, but to the best of my recollection, it'd have been easier to report places where the air didn't smell bad...

The city has changed a lot over the last decade. You'd be surprised.

There are very few dirty areas around the greater Pittsburgh region. Is it perfect? No, but its hands-down cleaner than a lot of major US metro areas.

Not for long...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/03/why-tr...

Huh this is interesting. For those who might know... do we have odor sensors? Is that even possible to have? I guess it would need to be a chemical sensor that detects the chemicals in the odor right?

Prof. Lewis at Caltech has been working on this since at least the late 1990s, when I first learned about it as an undergraduate, and probably earlier:

http://nsl.caltech.edu/research:nose

I guess that would be a system like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_chromatography%E2%80%93mas... ?

Right, I guess I should have made my question more concise...are there electronic odor sensors? i.e. stuff small enough that can be e.g. put inside my cellphone.

As far as I am aware, the smallest available odor sensor is a trained bee or wasp. The hymenopterans are classically conditioned to extend their tongues when exposed to a particular chemical or odor profile. Then they are restrained inside a plastic cartridge, such that whenever they extend their tongues, a tiny button is pressed.

The cartridge is then loaded into a handheld device that lights an LED whenever the insect detects the odor.

Much cheaper than trained dogs, and the purely electronic detectors are not quite as robust [yet]. The downside is that you can't exactly buy it once and keep using it for the next 10 years.

Sniffer insects have been used to detect bombs, fungal blight, cancer, diabetes, pregnancy, contraband drugs, and uranium.

I thought this was all a joke, but apparently only some of it is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera_training

The cartridges are not mentioned in that article. I saw them on a television program. They so strongly resembled rows of schoolchildren sitting at their desks, that I half expected a bell to ring before the bees put their textbooks away and go on to learn another scent.

The commercial product is the VASOR136 by Inscentinel Ltd.

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.269373!/file/Sniff...

Pretty small, but not cell-phone sized. https://www.amazon.com/MicrOptix-VSA-100-Analyzing-Spectroph...

Ones that detect particular contaminants can be a lot smaller, especially if they are single-use.

That's a spectrophotometer, not a GC/MS... Can you detect smelly airborne chemicals with this as well?

Reading the description, it might be for liquids instead. Anyway it won't give as much information about the molecular components as a mass spectrometer, but you can still get a good idea if there are contaminants.

Possibly.

Here is an article from MIT in 2014 detailing recent discoveries and improvements in chip tech that could allow this: http://news.mit.edu/2014/wireless-chemical-sensor-for-smartp...

Sort of.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_nose

Check out the example section in particular for something that doesn't look as huge as GC/MS setups.

I don't think they're quite small enough to be pocketable, but some cities do sweeps with specialized on-car air quality equipment to find natural gas leaks (Boston leaks like a sieve, for example - https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps/city-snapshots/bosto...)

I've heard of development on drug detection "vaccumes" / machines, so it's probably possible. Kind of a scary idea tbh.

Edit: Apparently they are already in use at prisons. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997-10-02/news/1997275114_...

you should check out www.maskau.dk/projects/electronic-nose -- he's doing amazing stuff with $2 sensors (and we're working with him to try to smell fruit growing on trees)

While I was out trying to find the possible applications for Sunon's adorable 9mm blowers[1], I came across Cairpol's Cairsens devices[2]. I'm not sure what the technology they're using is, but they're claiming to measure about ten different classes of air pollutants out of a cylinder that looks about the size of a D-Cell battery.

[1] http://www.sunon.com/publication_page.php?pkid=3 [2] http://cairpol.com/en/home/

Do you mean like Smellmaster 9000 from Richie Rich (1994) movie?

https://assets3.thrillist.com/v1/image/1378286/size/tl-horiz...

This movie had ever lasting impression on me and I have always wondered if we could have such device =)

Why the hell does the header image show people sniffing their mobile phones?

TechCrunch may not know how "Using a smartphone to send a message over the Internet" works. Surprising for a tech-journalism-focused organization, I know. ;)

> Considering Pittsburgh once had awful air quality thanks to coal and steel industry, it’s no wonder folks are still worried about stinky air.

This implies that it no longer has awful air quality, but that's not true. It's still quite bad.

http://www.stateoftheair.org/2015/msas/pittsburgh-new-castle...

Apples and oranges, right? Pittsburgh is much smaller than the MSA as a whole.

Off the top of my head, a lot of the problem areas aren't in the city, though they're close. Braddock, Clairton, Neville Island (with particulates floating over to Avalon) all come to mind as places with pollution-y manufacturing, and they're all outside the city limits.

If the app's coverage goes all the way through Allegheny County my point is diminished, though.

Also worth noting that, even though our air might not be great, it was SO BAD before that anything toady is going to be better by comparison.

This is true, but given the right conditions, those of us that live in the city can definitely notice bad air quality days. I live in the East End, a stone's throw from the Allegheny, and if the wind is blowing right, there is a distinct sulfur smell in the air.

Also worth noting that, even though our air might not be great, it was SO BAD before that anything toady is going to be better by comparison.

Yes, this is definitely true.

SF has much worse air quality than Pittsburgh though, actually

https://qz.com/963089/california-is-home-to-eight-of-the-10-...

Preemptive plea: Please don't shoot the messenger by downvoting me for sharing this demonstrably factual information with you (I know it's coming, I know how this site works now).

I always found the frequent sewage scent wafting up from the bowels of the streets in San Francisco very startling. Usually around Embarcadero and SOMA regions.

> Preemptive plea: Please don't shoot the messenger by downvoting me for sharing this demonstrably factual information with you (I know it's coming, I know how this site works now).

Chance of that is higher if you don't talk about downvoting. A number of people will downvote you just for that.

A lot of the PM2.5 (the kind of pollution mentioned in the link offered by parent) in the Bay Area is from houses and apartments burning wood.

Source: http://www.ozy.com/acumen/think-chinas-pollution-is-bad-try-...

FWIW Here is a direct comparison [1] between the Metro Stat Areas (MSA) of 'San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA' and 'Pittsburgh-New Castle-Weirton, PA-OH-WV'

[1] http://www.stateoftheair.org/2015/city-rankings/compare-your...

You're being downvoted for at least two reasons. One, you are off topic, and trying very hard to be inflammatory, and two, because whining about downvotes is, itself, pollution.

I _am_ on topic, we are discussing air pollution, and most people I talk to around here are mistakenly under the impression that SF is this paragon of air quality, so mine is a pretty high entropy post sharing an interesting and not commonly known fact that often surprises people.

Meanwhile, you're attaching unfounded emotion to my post through projection (I've been sitting here the whole time with a perfectly chillaxed and even slightly amused attitude); my post has had a non-negative score its entire lifetime -- only one person downvoted it (you?), so I'm more inclined to believe that somebody else that is not me is the problem here.

I'd love to see a heatmap of this in New York.

All of Manhattan would just be labeled "Garbage water smell" for the summer months.

All part of the carefully crafted ambiance, my friend

It would be interesting to see how far/intense the Tacoma Aroma extends.

I lived near Cheney stadium and it didn't seem to go that far west.