Bomb detection squads may switch from dogs to elephants going by a recent study by Japanese scientists that proclaims the pachyderm as the species with a strongest sense of smell. Just like the trunk that is long, the African elephant's genome contains a long chain of olfactory receptor genes, nearly 2,000, says the study in the journal Genome Research. This means elephants' sniffers are five times more powerful than human noses, twice that of dogs, and even stronger than the previous known record-holder in the animal kingdom: rats. Just how these genes work is not well understood, but they likely helped elephants survive and navigate their environment over the ages.
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