India, Dec. 21 -- What do firefighters ask Santa Claus? Ok, they are perhaps too grown-up for that, but if they were to make a wistful wish, what might they go for? No traffic jams? Possibly. Faster trucks? Certainly. No cats on the ledges? Definitely. Bigger hoses and buckets? Why not. Tougher blankets? Never hurts.

The answer, however, lies not in the smoke or the flames-but in the calm before the siren. It begins far ahead, even before the alarm bell rings or the call reaches the fire station. If firefighters could ask for something miraculous, it might be something deceptively simple yet notoriously hard to get-what if humans could detect a fire before the smoke spirals out of control?

This is precisely the sort of pre-emptive think...