Drug-sniffing Mice? Yep, and That's Not All

Had enough of pat-downs and sniffing dogs? Make way for mice.

Yes, those furry, four-legged fidgety friends will be making your life a bit more difficult — but only if you're carrying drugs or bombs through an Israeli airport.

Seems this company has designed a drug detector that makes use of the advanced technology of mice's olfactory nerves to raise the alarm on whether drugs are onboard your person. It looks like a scanner, but it's really a mouse house. Eight specially trained (Aren't they all?) mice hang out in each of three hidden cartridges in the scanner, working a half-day (only four hours, you know) on guard duty.

How do they do it? Well, the scanner gets a whiff of the air around it and gets all the smells contained therein and then transmits those smells inside the cartridges, where the mice can get a whiff, and then the mice go crazy if they smell even a whisker of illegal or explosive paraphernalia and make their intentions known by running into a side chamber.

Wonderfully precise drug testing, no? "Wait," you say, "what about the mouse that gets a wild hair and just starts running around just because?"

Good question. BioExplorers, makers of the scanner, have an answer: It's not considered a drug detection unless more than one mouse goes in the special side chamber. And when at least two mice go in there, they trigger an alarm and red lights flash and security gates come crashing to the ground and people get carted off to interrogation rooms without their luggage or their traveling companions … well, that's how it could work.

It might just work, if the device gets picked up on the open market. The manufacturers did test it, and it did work, after a fashion, identifying a large handful of people carrying mock explosives. So, hey, maybe it's worth a shot.