- French researcher Baptiste Piqueret published his study this week showing that ant’s strong sense of smell can detect mice with cancerous tumors.
- Piqueret and his team (University of Paris Sorbonne) implanted pieces of human breast-cancer tumors onto mice and trained silky ants to associate cancer-infected mice urine with sugar.
- Petri dish experiments found that the ants spent “significantly more time” near test tubes with urine from the cancerous mice.
- While more research needs to be done, ants could become significantly less-expensive cancer detectors.
