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Asked by harrypotterscientist to Adrian, Gaia, Jim, Scott, Vicky on 11 Mar 2016.
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Gaia Andreoletti answered on 11 Mar 2016:
Sixteen pigeons at the University of California, Davis, have been trained to distinguish between microscope slides of benign and malignant breast tissue. They were rewarded with food for correctly determining which was which, and in a remarkable display of rapid pattern detection, these common birds learned how to diagnose breast cancer within just a couple of weeks. They not only had an accuracy rate of 85 percent after being trained for just 13 days, but when multiple pigeons were asked to analyze the same slide, their accuracy climbed to 99 percent.
Despite this, it’s unlikely you’ll walk into a hospital and see pigeons flying around with little white lab coats on 😉
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Scott Lawrie answered on 11 Mar 2016:
Another pigeon story: once upon a time two radio-scientists called Wilson and Penzias made a new radio detector to listen very carefully to early balloon-satellites. They tried to get rid of all sources of noise (bad data) from the signal but there was still a faint hum coming from all over the sky: no matter where they pointed their telescope. They found some pigeons nesting inside the telescope and thought maybe their dung was emitting some kind of signal! After clearing that mess all out, the signal was still there. They didn’t know what it was.
It turns out that they were listening to the sound of the big bang and it was one of the most remarkable discoveries ever! Good job it wasn’t pigeons… 😉
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