http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/police-dog...d-drives-containing-child-pornography-1455648
Dogs are being trained to sniff out memory cards that are hidden in a suspects house.
I'm calling bull for now. I can't think how memory cards would have a unique smell.
Any truth in it do you think?
It's probably possible to a degree, as most memory cards and sticks will use one of a handful of plastics, which combined with the other smells that they have (things like the PCB backing, the plastic packaging of the chips, the coating on the PCB) will likely make something that is reasonably unique.
You then get the dog to sniff it out and basically the dog will hopefully point to spaces where there is possibly such a card, with the human doing the final decision/
I've got a feeling they already use dogs to help sniff out certain other plastic compounds used in contraband/counterfeit items (IIRC CD/DVD).
The idea isn't so much that the dog knows it's X, but that the dog can find something that smells like it, and point the human trainer towards it, which for things like memory cards that are easily hidden could both find stuff that might otherwise be missed, and save a lot of time on searches (you can hide a micro SD card in a really tiny place, such as the joint between two bits of wood, or behind a screw).
Apparently the space station has to have anything sent up checked for smell by a specially trained human team, as well as chemists to avoid sending anything up that could potentially create a toxic atmosphere in the sealed station (I think they discovered sending up too many CD's could do it!), or create lingering harmless smells that would build up and both become an annoyance, and possibly mask smells that could indicate a problem (overheating electronics etc).