why neuroscience is cool.

Over dinner last night:

Meg: "Oh, remember those giant rats my Grandma told me about?"
Matt: (wide-eyed stare) "Ummm...what?"
Meg: "I guess I forgot to mention that..."

A few nights ago, my Grandma and I were chatting when she mentioned that she had read something in the paper that she's been meaning to tell me about. Giant rats are being trained to sniff out landmines in Mozambique. She thought I would be interested since I have been known to work with rodents. Don't be jealous.

So of course, I googled this nonsense. And it is totally legit. This group breeds the African giant pouched rat and trains them to use their extremely sensitive olfactory abilities to detect the foreign materials in the ground. Unlike metal detectors, they are able to find plastic-cased landmines, as well as metal-cased. The rats are light enough that they DO NOT set off any of the mines. They are faster than human demining teams. And rats are very smart and have the capacity to learn many tasks. Click below for a video demonstrating their current procedure for surveying a plot of land.


Turns out, that's not all they are being trained to do. They are currently developing a training program to have the rats sniff out Tuberculosis bacteria from human sputum samples. Preliminary studies have found them to be faster and in some cases more accurate than traditional diagnostic tests. The website asserts that the traditional method takes a lab tech 2 days to process samples, while the rats are able to go through a whole line-up of samples in a few minutes.

My Grandma read about this in The Washington Post. The program was featured in the Holiday Gift Guide, as you can sponsor individual rats for a year.


And a thank you to Grandma Jessup for passing this along!

what a mess.

It was in the news. I heard about it on the radio. (And by "the radio," we all know I really mean our local NPR station, WUNC). It was this summer, when I read this article in Newsweek, that I began to pay more attention to what was happening in Zimbabwe. I remember feeling somewhat ashamed that I wasn't familiar with the extent of what was going on in their country. As their June runoff "election" grew closer, reports of violence (fueled by President/Tyrant Robert Mugabe) grew more frequent.

Brief interlude for some background: Mugabe, who has been in power for 28 years, was seen as a liberterian hero to the people when he became Zimbabwe's head of government after it gained independence from Britain. But in those years, he launched a moral campaign against white Zimbabweans and homosexuals. He has rigged multiple elections in order to stay in power and have his party maintain majority in the parliament. He has allowed the country's annual inflation rate to soar to at least 231 million percent, with some reports as high as 89.7 Sextillion percent, and the unemployment rate to, at minimum, 80 percent.

Then, just a few days before the June runoff, the opposition's candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, removed himself from the race - in an attempt to stop the violence against his supporters and to force other nations to intervene. We all know what happened next. Mugabe won the election, with something like 85% of the votes. African election officials deemed the June election neither free nor fair. And finally in July, South Africa President Thabo Mbeki managed to begin the process of brokering a "power sharing" agreement between the two. And then, just a few months later, President Mbeki resigned.

As talks have dragged on and now fallen apart between Mugabe and Tsvangirai, the people of Zimbabwe are suffering. It was only in late August that a THREE MONTH ban on foreign aid was lifted. It was also in August when the Central Bank made this move: "We are removing 10 zeros from our monetary value. Ten billion dollars today will be reduced to $1." This was an attempt to restore stability to the Zimbabwe dollar, since the new $100 billion notes were not enough to buy a loaf of bread.

And now, finally, Mugabe has admitted that the country is suffering from a cholera epidemic. It only took the infection of over 12,500 people, the deaths of over 560 people, the protesting from doctors and nurses over the desperate need for better working conditions and supplies. This disease is preventable and treatable.

On the same day, Kenya's Prime Minister declared that Mugabe needs to be removed. While this may seem quite obvious and not all that helpful to declare, this is a major step in the process. PM Raila Odinga's comments are some the strongest that have been publicly made by an African leader regarding Mugabe.

I want to be optimistic.

12/9/08 update: President Bush has called for Mugabe to step down.