Its reaction with the odour molecules changes a detector's electrical resistance, and this signal is fed into a neural net (the closest that computer technology has got to imitating the pattern-recognising abilities of networks of nerve cells) to work out what is being smelt.

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Prof Franklin said the procedure might be used alongside drug treatments to promote nerve fibre regeneration and bioengineering to substitute damaged neural networks.

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Neural networks are computer programs that, as their name suggests, behave rather like nerve cells in an animal's brain.

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