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Dutch Police Recruit Rats To Sniff Out Crime
An anonymous reader writes "Ratting someone out' just became much more literal. Dutch police are using trained rats to help keep the streets clean. 'Detective Derrick and his rat partners cost just £8 each and are capable of being trained to identify an impressive range of odors—including drugs and explosives—within ten to 15 days. In contrast, a police dog costs thousands of pounds and requires a minimum training period of eight months. The training procedure is straightforward: the rats are kept in a cage with four metal tea strainers attached inside, one of which contains gunpowder. When the rat recognizes the smell, it is rewarded with a "click" and a small treat. Eventually the rat will learn to move towards the smell instantly. In a demonstration it takes Derrick just two seconds to locate the offending odor."
I can see an animal arms race there.
Rats can also be trained to detect mines
Well, the obvious one:
"I can't believe you snitched on me, you dirty rat!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_(TV_series)
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Read the article, they are being used to sense gunpowder, not drugs. For once I actually think the police has got one hell of a new co-worker, the lady that noticed the mine-sniffing rats from the army could also be used in the police force to quickly get an idea if someone had fired a gun or not. I am sure there will still be lab-tests, but at least they can go on with their investigation based on a pretty acurate source.
That's just cheesy.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Sovjet? We have a king, you insensitive clod!
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Commence rat jokes.
Bah, rat jokes are stupid, as opposed to generic rodent jokes. But don't expect me to beaver away at them so that you could just squirrel them.
Ezekiel 23:20
Cut the manager-speak. "Can be trained".
In the Netherlands rats (and dogs) as well as their training are paid in Euros, not Pounds...
Sig?
I find it remarkable and interesting that we still can't or at least not easily produce eith sensors the sniffing capabilities of these critters.
Aside from the fact that the answer would more or less inevitably involve some you-have-fun-fabricating-that micro to nanoscale arrangement of chemical receptors, we labor under the considerable difficulty that we don't really know how scent works.
With something like sight, it's possible to work more or less entirely independently of any real understanding of the eye, human or otherwise, because things like 'primary colors' and color mixing actually work pretty well at handling a wide variety of real-world problems and are simple enough that a decent art curriculum probably covered them before you finished high school. There are certainly horrible complexities ('metallic' isn't a color; but it certainly is a recognizable optical phenomenon, also, please characterize any deviations from the expected result when I take the idealized 24-bit RGB image displayed on my non-ideal 8-bit RBG monitor and send it over to my printer, using CMYK inks...); but 'just put a photosensitive material behind an array of R G and B filters' does actually work. If you proceed to brute-force the hell out of it, it works even better.
With something like scent, we know about plenty of strong and distinctive scents; but nothing 'primary'. Mixing is somewhere between unintuitive and pure black magic, prediction from chemical structures(even if perfectly well defined and provided in whatever form you prefer) is quite difficult outside of a few very well known areas, it's a total mess. Certainly, our ability to (cheaply and quickly, and from very small samples) analyze chemicals in the environment isn't as advanced as we would like; but even if it were, it's not as though we can see ourselves progressing toward the smelloscope, with some technical limitations (as we could in the early days of photography, were basically everything sucked; but basically everything was also precisely analogous to its better-refined contemporary chemical film systems), we'd just be better at identifying molecules flying around in the air.
They must be Rattus Norvegicus.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Presumably rats can be trained to sniff for other substances, as well. It's an open question whether each rat could be trained to detect more than one substance, or detectives would have to carry around a golf bag of rats, each wearing a little jacket labeled with what substance it can sniff. Still, better to carry a golf bag of rats than a golf bag of German shepherds!
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
we'd just be better at identifying molecules flying around in the air
Which is the goal, ultimately. At least when used to detect drugs, explosives or other illegal substances. So even if it were easier to identify molecules flying around in the air than it is to build a smelling machine, it's easier still to use smelling animals.
Animal scent is based on vibrations in molecules that dock to receptors in the nose. This allows detection of very low concentrations of molecules. Similar systems can now be created artificially.
There is no compelling evidence that scent (animal or our own) is based upon "vibrations", although such theories do exist. Instead, it seem that odorant molecules bind to receptors in the nose in an analogous way to that by other ligand/receptor pairs, such as neurotransmitters to neurotransmitter receptors. The difference seems to be the most odorant receptors types bind to a range of different odorants. An animal such as s rat has hundreds of different classes of odorant receptor, each of which binds to different sub-sets of odors and so sees the world through a different lens. We think it's by comparing the activities of these different classes that odor discrimination is achieved.
soylentnews.org
Even dogs are getting outsourced now. :(