Sensing chemicals? There’s an app for that.

If you don’t have any bomb-sniffing bees around to look for trance quantities of explosive gas, why not use your iPhone instead? That’s exactly what Jing Li and a team of researchers from NASA have done with their cell phone chemical sensor. By interfacing a postage stamp-sized sensor to a popular smart phone, they were able to create a device that can sense airborne ammonia, chlorine gas and methane, and report its findings over the cellular network or WiFi. Admittedly, it took a bit more than just a bit of software to add an electronic nose to the iPhone, but it’s still pretty neat use of a consumer device. [via inhabitat]