Dogs have a very accurate sense of smell; they can reliably sniff out various things.

There's a number of scentwork dog sports. For example, AKC scentwork titles use birch, anise, clove, and cypress oils. There's also e.g. barnhunt, where dogs have to identify which pvc tubes contain pet rats and which are empty or only have rat bedding.

The problem is that departments don't train dogs and handlers well, because they don't actually want effective detection dogs, they want probable cause generators.

It's fairly well known that dogs can read cues from their handlers and alert when the handler thinks there's something there. But that can be fixed by more adversarial training and testing where handlers are misled on the number of items they need to find, and if they can't control their own body language and cause a false alert they fail.

The big dig, too.

> ### ... but land is expensive!

> ### ... and Cambridge has height construction limits!

> ### The proposed solution: increase height limits for affordable housing

You know, it's almost as if height limits in general are bad for housing affordability, and NIMBYs are in denial that they are a huge part of the problem.