Puzzlement turned to wonder when a group of Dutch doctors who were carrying out cancer research stumbled upon a pair of new salivary glands. It was a feat made possible by their curiosity and new technology. The doctors from the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NCI) in Amsterdam were in 2017 studying scans from prostate and urethral gland cancer patients, which pinpointed pools of cancer cells in the body. The specialised scans detect salivary glands as well. When they called up the first images of the patients' head and neck regions, they expected to see the three known pairs of salivary glands near the ears and jaw light up in orange. But they were surprised to see a pair of curious-looking spindly structures smack in the middle of the head glowing too. The structures had never been seen before. "At first, we thought... it's not real. Or maybe it was some sort of tissue. But it looked a bit like a salivary gland, and then we wondered if it is a salivary gland," said Dr Wouter Vogel, a radiation oncologist at NCI. All 100 scans - 99 from males and one from a female - detected the hook-like pair lodged in the area where the nasal cavity and throat meet. The average length of each tiss...