Like sound-cancelling headphones, kinda sorta, for odors

If you know how noise-cancelling headphones work, you may have wondered whether the same kind of technical trick — producing your own vibrations that exactly cancel out the “noise” vibrations — might somehow work with smells. Twin-brother scientists Kush and Lav Varshney spent some time noodling on that notion. (Thanks to Martin Gardiner for telling me about the Varshneys.)

Kush (now at IBM, formerly at MIT) and Lav (now at the University of Illinois, formerly at IBM, and before that at MIT) have just presented a paper at a scientific conference — the IEEE International Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing — in Australia.

They call their somewhat-refined idea “active odor cancellation”….

—so begins another Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on BetaBoston.