So... it's not bad that I read the entire page and went into a ten, fifteen-second long giggle fit of glee?
Uhhhh - it's Irish humor so be warned
* Through dark magic, Sara returns from being eaten by an allosaur
(Hey, one can hope.)
Yikes that would be terrifying depending how big it was, how it consumed her and how effective it's digestive tract was.
Yeah - it is never fun for the immortals when they get swallowed whole - Sanity warning, this is disturbing on many levels but some consider it "funny"
Secondly: I know this is a universe with super-advanced technology, but I wonder how the chemical sensors that serve as "smell" work for AI. The human olfactory sense is very complex and (despite the popular wisdom claiming otherwise, mostly because we tend to compare humans to animals whose sense of smell is EVEN better than ours) incredibly sensitive and fine-tuned to many different substances. My mother is a chemist by education and she tested food for a living, for some time. Her claim is that a human smell or taste (if it isn't dulled by regular smoking and the like) can actually detect much smaller traces of certain substances, if you're trained for that, than many simple chemical tests. In fact, in some cases only a rather expensive and complex (and somewhat time-consuming) analysis yields more precise results for certain substances than human senses.
Granted, that was a couple of decades ago, but while technology may progress fast, it doesn't progress SO fast that I'd believe it would make a huge jump in that respect.
Since I see no reason to disbelieve my mother's experience, technology that'd provide instant recognition of smells an order of magnitude better than a human nose's would be rather impressive indeed. I'd personally peg that as much more impressive than stuff like artificial muscle/bodies.
EDIT: now that I think about it, it's perfectly possible that AI bodies feel certain smells much more strongly than humans, and certain smells weakly or not at all. It would be very difficult to notice this difference in most everyday situations, I imagine. Say, if a human and an AI had a completely different subjective experience of the same smell due to registering different chemical components, it would not likely come up in conversation, unless a human and an AI were comparing two smells ("what do you MEAN those two smell alike?").
Gas sensors on a chip have been a thing for a while now.
As for not that huge a jump in the technology, I would recon the tech has progressed about as fast as computer technology.
Mil Spec parts are usually more robust than anything commercial or used in a lab.
When you think about it, a military schnoz needs to detect various aromatic and volatile compounds used in a combat theater - explosives, chemical agents, unwashed bodies, sepsis, decomposition - noting the levels of sensitivity required as well as the military penchant for going overboard on the specifications.
Also having a sniffer blown up is cheaper in resources and having the need to send out letters of condolence.
Humans are actually rather nose blind compared to the other species we associate with on a general level - it is only through training that we humans are able to discern faint variances and trace amounts. Add to that experience, training and a fast analysis turn around time compared to most bench-top systems the trained human almost always wins, BUT it looses on the sheer volume of samples handled, low downtime and repeatability of the tests.