Posted on 06/26/2024 12:21:50 PM PDT by Red Badger
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.
Different odors sparked recognizable brain activity patterns, a kind of neural fingerprint for scent, Saha and colleagues report June 4 in Biosensors and Bioelectronics. One day, he says, doctors might be able to use honeybees in cancer clinics as living sensors for early disease detection.
Electronic noses, or e-noses, and other types of mechanical odor-sensing equipment exist, but they’re not exactly the bee’s knees. When it comes to scent, Saha says, “biology has this ability to differentiate between very similar mixtures, which no other engineered sensors can do.”
Scent is an important part of how many insect species communicate, says chemical ecologist Flora Gouzerh of the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development in Montpellier. For them, “it’s a language,” she says.
The idea that animal senses can get a whiff of disease is nothing new; doctors reported a case of a border collie and a Doberman sniffing out their owner’s melanoma in 1989. More recently, scientists have shown that dogs can detect COVID-19 cases by smelling people’s sweat (SN: 6/1/22). A lot of insects probably have disease-detecting abilities, too, Gouzerh says. Ants, for instance, can be trained to pick out the smell of cancer cells grown in a lab dish.....
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
My ex-wife had a knack for smelling out credit card applications.
Like the 1970s board game "Operation," only a lot harder.
Honey bees are domesticated, common, and cheap.
Worker bees are expendable units of the hive. They are analagous to human hair.
They cannot reproduce, and are relatively short lived.
Nicotine breath?
“Worker bees are expendable units of the hive. “
Worker bees dictate everything that happens in a hive. The queen serves them.
Critical and short-lived, but not expendable.
The beehive is a stunningly complex miracle of God.
Respectfully,
Ok, but how do they tell me?
Critical and short-lived, but not expendable.
How Queen Elizabeth II viewed her realm. perhaps a model in miniature of God's design for human governance as well
Yes. It is best viewed as a single organism, with multiple semi-autonomous, non-reproducing parts.
Beehives reproduce more beehives.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.