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.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Last week's White House report reiterated President Biden's employer mandate that businesses with 100 or more employees require every worker to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 or tested weekly. Jeffrey Zients, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, summarized in last week's press briefing that, "We are on track to quadruple the supply of rapid, at-home tests available to Americans by December to more than 200 million a month and to increase the number of places Americans can access free testing in the United States to 30,000 community-based locations." He emphasized the president's staunch commitment in adding $1 billion of extra funding already to the recent $2 billion investment to increase supply.

READY FOR ITS CLOSE-UP: Artificial intelligence has long been hyped as a game changer in health care: Remember this 2012 prediction that computers will replace 80 percent of doctors? But it's been much harder to get a sense of the real-world scale of the phenomenon. Is AI a perpetual technology of the future? Or is it starting to get a toehold? A recently released Food and Drug Administration database starts to get at that question.

He's 11-years-old and, until he can receive his shots, Gronvall's been using at-home COVID-19 test kits in order to determine if his sniffles are more than allergies or a slight cold. The test swabs are longer than a Q-tip, but easier on the nasal cavity than a flu diagnostic or the original "brain swab" used to test for COVID since early in the pandemic. "There's often a lot of stuff coming out of their nose," Gronvall said of her kids, with a slight chuckle, when we talked recently. As an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Gronvall knows the importance of testing. "We can't all rely on everybody being extra scrupulous and paying attention to all of the COVID restrictions," she said.