ABC News reports on dogs who can identify cancer by sniffing, starting out with the story of Carolyn Withers, who claims that her Labrador retriever started jumping on her right breast and barking. She did a breast self-exam and found a lump. She had surgery and is now fine. Coincidence?

In one study cited in the report, dogs were trained to sniff different urine samples and distinguish between those from people with bladder cancer and control sample. Other studies have shown that dogs can distinguish between breath samples of those with lung or breast cancer and controls. Researchers are now trying to figure out what exactly the dogs are smelling to come up with more precise tests.

Harvey Pass, head of thoracic surgery at NYU Medical Center, thinks that dog-sniffing clinics might just happen one day. "Could you imagine you have the early detection clinic that's in a given area of the hospital, that people would come, and then they'd go into a room and there's a series of dogs, that then look at them and they either lie down, or they sit up, and just that signal may tell you what's going on. I wouldn't bet against it."

A simple new blood test can detect early stage liver cancer, according to researchers led by Chitty Chen at the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology and Ghent University in Belgium.

Liver cancer is a major killer in Asia and Africa due to the high prevalence of hepatitis infections that can cause the disease.

Current tests include biopsies, imaging and the AFP test, but these methods are not as sensitive as the new test. This new test detects changes in the sugars attached to the proteins that occur in liver cancer. According to the researchers, the test is more effective when used with the AFP test, which measures various markers in the blood, indicating tumor presence.

Does cancer have a smell? I wouldn't think so but apparently the most sensitive noses in the world -- those belonging to dogs -- can detect the presence of cancer with alarming accuracy, according to this. Dogs were 99% accurate at detecting lung cancer and 88% accurate at detecting breast cancer, regardless of attempts to mask the smell through food or cigarettes.

Apparently, tumors give out small amounts of alkanes and benzene, which have a slight odor, and once a dog is trained to pick up that smell, it has a good chance of detecting it in the future.

Is that amazing or what?