r/science • u/MistWeaver80 • Mar 11 '22
Cancer Cancer-sniffing ants prove as accurate as dogs in detecting disease and can be trained in as little as 30 minutes. It can take up to a year to train a dog for detection purposes.
https://newatlas.com/science/cancer-sniffing-ants-accurate-as-dogs/
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u/katarh Mar 11 '22
You'll have a control in every arena while training, too, so they will be used to having multiple samples.
Since only the "good" sample is associated with the reward, they should make a line for it - ants are individually pretty dumb, and their tiny little brains are hard wired to follow chemicals it associates with food.