Building a Better Nose

For dog lovers, the idea of friendly canines as living, breathing, tail-wagging cancer detectors is a hopeful one. Not only do dogs conjure smiles, but their known olfactory abilities would offer a strange contrast to the sterile medical exam rooms many find dreadful: brushed steel countertops, white lab coats, buttercup walls, and the penetrating smell of disinfectants. But if dogs have already shown the ability to detect cancer on human breath or urine, researchers have now found one better: Ants could be a more cost-effective means of harnessing the same super-sniffing abilities of their distant cousin canines to help detect cancer and other illnesses in humans. We may eventually be able to use both dogs and ants to train artificial intelligence-powered devices to do the same thing. "Insects have a life that is much shorter than that of mammals. They have to learn fast," says Patrizia d'Ettorre, an expert in ant behavior at University Paris 13 in France.