By Float like a butterfly, sniff out cancer like a bee?
Honeybees can detect the subtle scents of lung cancer in the lab — and even the faint aroma of disease that can waft from a patient’s breath.
Inspired by the insects’ exquisite olfactory abilities, scientists hooked the brains of living bees up to electrodes, passed different scents under the insects’ antennae and then recorded their brain signals. “It’s very clear — like day and night — whether [a bee] is responding to a chemical or not,” says Debajit Saha, a neural engineer at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
