Sunday Rerun: It only takes tenants to rent an apartment

 Someone left a coffee cake too close to the fax machine in an office where I worked. And I want to tell you, the ants that came to gobble the cake over the weekend also checked into the fax machine. By Monday, the fax machine was not working, but the ants were. 

We had to replace the machine. You never saw so many ants in one colony.  (A group of ants is a colony; a group of aunts is a book club.)

And yes, ants come to pester us around here every spring. One single ant, as far away as Cleveland, can tell when one single grain of sugar falls onto our kitchen counter, and the next thing you know, that ant and his entire family move in, until remedial measures are taken.

But now, here we are in 2023, finding out that ants can do medical research, when they're not busy bedeviling suburban homeowners.

Researchers have now trained ants to detect cancer in urine.

I know, it's a lot to imagine, but with ten million people dying of cancer every year, any tool we can use to diagnose the dreaded disease is for the good.

And scientists have figured that ants can use their tiny antennae to sniff out cancer in urine. 

The full story is in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: journal (your copy should be in the mail). Without getting too gross, let's just say that we now know that some types of cancer change the smell of our liquid waste, and the reason for this is that cancer cells emit what science calls VOCs: volatile organic compounds.

And just as dogs can sniff out cancer by identifying body smells, ants, which do not detect smells through their noses as we do, have antennae, as we do not, and scientists have had ants traipsing through puddles of pee and coming back to report they smell cancer VOCs.

And they learned to do this in just three training sessions, which is two fewer than it took a crack team of Baltimore County IT trainers to get me to learn to work Excel spreadsheets!

So, next time, how's about not stepping on that ant you see? Someday, it might just save your life with an early diagnosis.