Trained Rats Map Minefields With GPS

An anonymous reader writes "Believe it or not, but the Department of Defense is paying psychologists to train rats to find mines and circle around them. By attaching little GPS backpacks and supplying a laptop with software that looks for the 'circling around' signature, the DOD hopes its project will allow the release of platoons of rats near suspected minefields so that the laptop software creates a detailed map of where all the mines are located automatically. Not sure if they plan on picking up the rats afterward, but they do assure us that the rats are too lightweight to set off the mines!"

Comments

Boom

[Niris]

Best minesweeper mod ever.

Re:Boom

[Immerman]

That's what legs, bicycles, and bus-passes are for. Or a scooter if you want more speed, range, and versatility, it's a rare scooter that gets under 70mpg. Or find work closer to home (admittedly difficult in some cities).

  And if you're not getting health insurance you should be taking home a heck of a lot more than half your salary.

Re:Boom

[timeOday]

People now think they have a right to have children and also that making somebody else pay for children they failed to properly plan on is some kind of fundamental human right. It isn't.

Human beings are living organisms and so have strong survival instincts. Biological imperatives (e.g. reproduce) typically trump social conventions (e.g. property rights). That's not a value judgment on my part; it's a fact. So, if you're waiting for the poor to peaceably fade into oblivion out of respect for the sanctity of the legal rights of those around them, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

Re:Boom

[kermidge]

"In most places in the US you can find at *least* a tiny studio apartment in a non-shithole neighborhood for under $300", et cetera.

I don't know where you live or what your latest explorations into rentals have shown you. I live in a small (50-55k) city in the Midwest and pay $473 for ~ 145 sq. ft. apartment partitioned from a house built in the 1880s in a decidedly non-genteel block near "downtown" where I have walking access to food. In local terms, I've got a good deal - an "affordable" price (about 2/3 of my Social Security), decent landlord, heat and electric included, nearby "amenities."

Please show me your menu for one for a month on $100. Nothing wrong with beans and rice, and the local mercado has good prices on chicken and veggies. My food stamps allow about $6.50/day, so it's doable, but I'd still like to see your menu based on half that.

Where will I put paying roommates, presuming such can be found? Fuck, my usable living area is comparable to a jail cell. I hope that I can save enough in a year buy the stuff to loft the bed so's to have room for the computer table and a chair and a lamp. How long at what savings per month to move to a cheaper location? Chances are I'll be long dead ere then.

Many things can theoretically be done. If you've got superior info and know-how, I'd be happy to be the recipient. My willingness and ability, medical matters aside, to deal with what level of stinting to get to greener grass whilst still alive, and, one hopes, the ability to enjoy such, is open for consideration. YMMV.

Re:Boom

[Immerman]

On the menu - I've never really had one: go to the store, buy whatever's cheap, and do something creative with it. A good cookbook helps for inspiration - I'd recommend Joy of Cooking, the older the better. It's a rare off-the-wall ingredient that it doesn't have at least a handful of different recipes for, and more common stuff typically includes a "strategic overview" discussion of the common cooking techniques and the pros and cons thereof.

General thoughts: For non-perishable stuff wait until it's on sale and buy as much as you can afford - you can build up a well-stocked larder for surprisingly little cash, and having at least several weeks worth of food on-hand makes you immune to transient price hikes and income shortages, as well as meaning you always have a wide variety of ingredients on-hand to play with. Buy in bulk. A styrofoam cooler in the freezer will let you store meat and vegetables indefinitely with very little freezer burn - just don't open it more than a few times a week and be sure to pre-freeze food before adding it - it's the temperature fluctuations that do most of the damage. 10lb of whole-wheat flour, a little sugar, and a jar of yeast is a lot cheaper, healthier, and more filling than anything in the bread aisle, you can find a bread machine at most thrift stores for $10 if you keep your eyes open for a while, which will not only save you a lot of work, but also let you put it on a timer and wake up to the smell of fresh-baked bread in the morning, a real treat. Keep sodas, refined sugars, and white flour intake to a minimum (along with other simple carbohydrates) - insulin shock makes you hungry again long before your body actually needs more food. Same goes for frozen dinners, with the added fact that they're terribly unhealthy. Green cabbage is cheap, filling, and goes great in stews, sandwichs, salads, etc. Keep a bottomless soup-pot in the refrigerator - restock it with all the leftover bits and pieces (meat trimmings, vegetable greens, diced stems, you name it) you've save from other meals, there's rarely cause to throw anything edible away. Be sure to save all your bones to temporarily add while simmering as well, lots of good flavor and nutrients in those, especially if the marrow is accessible, just try to avoid shards (especially common on factory-butchered chicken), you can't fish those out with the rest, and they're no fun to encounter when enjoying a delicious bowl of soup and some good coarse bread. Oh, and build up a good stock of spices and learn to use them. They make the difference between edible and delicious, and a huge variety are available in the $1-$2 range for a jar which may well last a year or more.

I was brought up that way and even though I've got plenty of income these days I'm still hard-pressed to spend more than $150 a month to feed myself without really indulging on a regular basis.

Re:Boom

[kermidge]

Ok, thanks, that's some good stuff. That's generally the way I shop, btw.

I no longer have any of them, but the five best food books I've run across are Joy of Cooking, early 30s; Diet for a Small Planet; the Culinary Institute of America 'bible'; The Art of One-Armed Cookery (not The One-Armed Cook, I'm thinking of the one written by a woman in Boston who ran a rooming house and decided there was little worth cooking that couldn't be done with a bottle of beer in hand); and On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. (http://www.curiouscook.com/site/on-food-and-cooking.html)

Moving out of the dorms in '67 was a great crash dive into putting something edible let alone appetizing on the table. I'd already had two years experience working mostly in pizza restaurants and four years experience in a resort hotel kitchen during high school. There followed a year cooking ribs and chicken at a BBQ, two years of line cooking, a year of short-order, a year as an "apprentice sous-chef" - not a real station, but our chef had just come from CIA and believed in acting as much as a teacher and coach as anything else - and a few more years of bits and pieces. Plus what I've done on my own, yeasted- and short-breads, gardens, beer- and wine-making, what have you, a bit of hunting and fishing when in the boonies and hungry.

Your suggestions and pointers are spot-on, but carry some presumptions. F'rinstance, I've zilch for freezer in the over-sized dorm refrigerator - it gets "meal packs" in plastic containers. I have two circuits running through the apt.; the bathroom light is off who knows what, maybe the hall lights, the two outlets on the other handle the reefer, a lamp, and the computer. I hesitate to think seriously about getting a full size icebox, could I find one and transport it, even if the landlord approved. (All three thrift stores have been driven to the city outskirts and none of them still deliver.) Add in use of fan, coffee maker and microwave, the amps budget is tight since my one useful circuit is shared by Lord knows who or what, and has a nasty habit of tripping when least wanted.

There's a couple of places I plan on making shelves as material is found; stocking much is problematic as I've some fairly serious limitations on how much I can carry for any distance - I buy dried goods in one to ten pound bags. The norm is to buy food for one to several days and hope to be well enough to buy more before I run out. Current equipment is... basic. Right now a small stainless pot serves for soups, stews, and my killer spaghetti sauce. Making yoghurt again is in the cards when I can provide regulated temperature range. The gas range is decent and I keep sourdough starter. Don't misunderstand, please, I get by most days, it's just that it can sometimes be a bit more than a challenge. (I also admit a yen for Ben&Jerry's when it's on sale.)

Thanks again for your suggestions. Herbs are your friends. The tip on insulin shock was a good catch as well. (I use two things to help guide what I end up cooking - protein complementarity and the glycemic and insulin indices.)

Cheers.

As for saving enough to get out of Dodge, that's another matter, apart from destination. Meanwhile I've applied to several subsidized-housing places but with a felony conviction that's iffy. (Maybe I'll win that $3K from Walgreen's - which would likely be used for a new build and other necessities.)

As a New Yorker...

[XPeter]

I'd love to see those fat little fuckers get blown up to pieces.

Maybe the DoD can come take some from the subway?

Re:Mines aren't the worry

[godrik]

actually the GPS on the rat might be more expensive than the rat itself :)

Don't need the DoD, already being done

[OnceWas]

It's not crazy, and it's already being done, by organization like HeroRATs - http://www.apopo.org/cms.php?cmsid=107. They train African giant pouched rats to detect mines. They're also using them to detect tuberculosis, in human spit. Yuck, but way cool.

Nothing New

[Nethemas the Great]

Nothing new They've been using rats for landmine detection in Africa for quite some time now.

Re:Mines aren't the worry

[sdnoob]

Hawks, coyotes, and other predators are

that's the other part of the program: 'organic mine removal drones'.

Ancient Joke Alert

[Anonymous Coward]

What goes peck-peck-bang?

A chicken in a minefield!

Sorry, it just seemed appropriate...

odor signatures

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA says they train the rat to recognize the odor of the explosives in the soil. Wouldn't it be easy to enclose the explosive in a hermetically sealed wrapper to keep any such odor in the mine?

Also, wouldn't it be better to train lawyers for this? We have more of them than rats, and they're not as cute and the soldiers will become less attached to them, in case they do set off some of the mines.

Cheap countermeasure

[Grayhand]

A few bags of Reese's Pieces spread around the field could be an effective way to confuse the rats. I haven't heard of rats being trained to ignore food when they are working like dogs. Another option would be if the mine could be triggered by a rat digging coat it with food smells. You loose a mine but you take out an expensive trained rat.

Re:Cheap countermeasure

[Arancaytar]

The fake baits might work if the rat can't be trained to ignore them, but false positives are not the issue when clearing mines. Neither is relative attrition - in combat, mine clearance already is very costly (including in casualties) and only done when the tactical advantage is worth it; in humanitarian mine clearing, the relative attrition is beside the point anyway, as there is no enemy.

(Also, the reason landmines are not designed to be triggered by small animals is that most places are full of small animals, so you'd be losing mines to wildlife all the time.)

Re:Mines aren't the worry

[GodfatherofSoul]

Well, not every rat can detect mines so you've got to factor in training. Hard to believe the time invested training the rat doesn't exceed a ~$50 GPS beacon.

Why train the rats?

[Laser_47]

Just get cheaper GPS units and make a note of when it stops sending data.

Re:Why train the rats?

[bane2571]

Improved headline: Untrained rats map minefields with explosions.

Re:Mines aren't the worry

[Anonymous Coward]

Rats can be trained very easily. They're bright enough to learn fast and yet dumb enough to walk into a minefield for us.

Those poor rats

[Nidi62]

Surely we could find an even lower organism to locate these mines? I mean, what have the rats ever done to us. Maybe we can use PETA members instead. They are always trying to save animals, let's see them put their money where their mouths are. Besides, I think we're better off having a bunch of rats than animal rights activists. At least the rats are more useful.

Re:Those poor rats

[hedgemage]

Using animals to do the dangerous work of finding mines is INHUMANE! I suggest we do what most war-torn developing countries do and let children find them.
(this is the troll post that guarantees me a ticket to hell, isn't it?)

Re:Those poor rats

[hyades1]

Initially, they tried using conservatives, but it was just too hard to get one near a conflict zone.

Re:Mines aren't the worry

[Sir_Sri]

which isn't all that dumb if they won't set off the mines, and get food when they're done.

GPS?

[dido]

For GPS to be useful for detecting mines in this way you'd need to have accuracy of the order of half a meter. I can barely get accuracy of less than ten meters with ordinary GPS. I suppose this is possible to do with differential GPS but I have to ask how long does it take to lock, and how well does it work in minefields that have obstructions from direct line of sight. Just having a building or a tree in the way causes accuracy to drop off significantly, and may cause loss of GPS signal altogether. I would have thought that they'd use some other means of position measurment that is not subject to such limitations.

Re:GPS?

[ghn]

Any of you who replied that 'military gps' is super accurate.. any reference to your claims? Not denying, just genuinely interested in knowing more about this.

KISS?

[Tolvor]

I've always wondered if there was a *simple* method to deactivate minefields cheaply (Keep It Simple and Straightfoward). I've wondered whether a cloth sack filled with 150 pounds of dirt (weight discriminating trigger), and dragged across a minefield with a long length of rope. If a mine goes off you lost one sack and need to shovel more dirt. Repeat as necessary.

I realize that this will probably not work since military contractors have spent a lot of time ensuring that the mines are 'smart'. However I think that there has to be a simple solution. Getting legions of highly trained rats to run through a minefield (and not set off the mines) does not fit the criteria of simple nor effective.

The solution of getting a mine deactivation specialist (or whatever the technical term the military gives it) to inch thru the minefield with a wire probe moving the soil at a careful handful at time isn't the solution either. There is simply too many mines, too few removal specialist, and it takes too long.

Fortunately for me I live in a country that for now does not have minefields (for now). I believe that minefields are evil. They persist for years, sometimes even decades, often target non-combatants, and are indiscriminate. There has to be a simpler solution than minefield rats. This sounds too much like bad movie science/comedy, like laser-armed sharks, or penguins armed with rocket launchers.

Yes Virginia, Mines are evil.

[way2trivial]

the acceptable civilian risk/kill ratio of mines makes them evil.

no other class of weapon is as inexpensive, and deadly decades later.

yes, occasionally unexploded artillery shells turn up on beaches....

but for the most part-- minefields left behind are just flat out wrong....

read up on it here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmine#Anti-personnel_mine_ban