If, like me, you think dogs are amazing, you’ll be even more amazed to learn they experience life in four dimensions—through their noses.

Dogs have an olfactory bulb 40 times larger than ours, with hundreds of millions more receptors.

They use that super-sniffer to build a three-dimensional smell map of their surroundings. Sort of like an interactive 3D computer model.

To that, they add a fourth dimension: time. They can smell how a scent has fallen in concentration, or oxidized and changed in character, to understand when something passed by, or an event occurred.

Because of these spectacular abilities, we’ve trained dogs for a variety of science “careers.”

Medical dogs can detect diseases, pregnancy or allergens—or when an episode of epilepsy or diabetes is about to come on.

Dog detectives help police and soldiers track criminals or enemy combatants and find drugs and explosives.

Disaster dogs hunt for survivors after avalanches and earthquakes. Cadaver dogs find bodies below water, soil and concrete.

Archaeology dogs have discovered human remains from 3,000 years ago!

Conservation dogs can locate endangered animals or invasive species.

Meteorite dogs can even find materials from outer space.

Through these tasks, we can access dogs’ four-dimensional scent maps, to know the world as they nose it.