.@maxhodak_ gives a fascinating explanation for why restoring smell with brain implants is much harder than fixing vision or hearing: Vision and audio are straightforward to digitize. We can already encode images as pixels and store audio as WAV files. But smell-o-vision would be far tougher to figure out. For years, companies have tried to create chemical detectors by growing neurons that express olfactory receptors - basically attempting to replicate a dog's nose, which are "some of the…