From Scotland’s Sunday Herald:

Despite fears the internet could kill off the printed word, death by natural causes may be a greater threat to our literary heritage and Scottish scientists are searching for the cure.

A researcher from Strathclyde University has teamed up with the British Library to design a method of “smelling” the chemicals given off by decaying paper, hoping the technique will lead to an easy way to test the “health” of valuable or ancient books and ensure their survival.

Helped along by a team of scientists who are bottling the atmosphere of the British Library in small test tubes, Jim Levicki, a postdoctorate researcher at the university’s department of pure and applied chemistry, is working to isolate these chemical markers of degradation – the smell of which will be familiar to anyone who has inhaled the musty air of old bookshops.

[…]Levicki has designed a unique machine – bearing a gold panel dedicating it to his engineer grandfather, James Stuart – in which a book is left for 48 hours, to give off its odours. The chemicals that make up the smells are then distilled, isolated and examined using a mass spectrometer.

When the results are finalised, it is hoped a portable chemical “nose” will be designed that could, for example, sit on the end of the robot arms that fetch books from the British Library’s archive or be placed along the shelves to warn of the signs of degradation.

We see this as more evidence of a robot plot to enslave us all. Getting sick in musty old bookshops is a big part of what makes us human, for frack’s sake.