Rats and bugs and minefields

INHABITAT IS A CHEERFUL SITE, devoted to green solutions to the problems we have around us.  Sarah Parsons has an article, titled "HeroRATS Trained to Sniff Out Landmines", which is worthy of your attention. 

Most people view rats as nothing more than pests, but one organization regards the critters as heroes. APOPO, an African-based non-profit, trains African Giant Pouched Rats to sniff out unexploded landmines. Organizers hope the rodents, or HeroRATS, will eventually be deployed across the globe as a cost-effective method to safely and efficiently detect and detonate hidden landmines.

You can visit HeroRATS to find out more, and even adopt one! Detecting explosives isn't all they can do, either:

HeroRATS also reliably detect pulmonary Tuberculosis (TB) in human sputum samples. Tuberculosis was the first pathogen addressed, as TB kills more youth and adults than any other single infectious disease in the world today. Currently, in 7 minutes one rat can evaluate 40 samples which is the equivalent of 2 days of microscopy work for a lab technician.

INHABITAT also has an article by Mike Chino, titled "Scientists Create Bacteria that Glows to Reveal Land Mines" that describes a successful effort by scientists at the University of Edinburgh to modify bacteria to do just that.

Land mines are currently strewn throughout 87 of the world’s countries, and each year they cause 15,000-20,000 new casualties, the vast majority of which are inflicted upon civilians. Sifting through minefields to remove these hidden threats is currently a dangerous, tedious, and expensive process, however scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently announced that they have engineered a strain of bacteria that glows green in the presence of explosives, making mine detection a snap.

Alaska's Rat Island is Rat Free

From Reuters:

Alaska's Rat Island is finally rat-free, 229 years after a Japanese shipwreck spilled rampaging rodents onto the remote Aleutian island, decimating the local bird population.

After dropping poison onto the island from helicopter-hoisted buckets for a week and a half last autumn, there are no signs of living rats and some birds have returned, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Rats have ruled the island since 1780, when they jumped off a sinking Japanese ship and terrorized all but the largest birds on the island. The incident introduced the non-native Norway rat -- also known as the brown rat -- to Alaska.

The $2.5 million Rat Island eradication project, a joint effort between the U.S. federal government, the Nature Conservancy and Island Conservation, is one of the world's most ambitious attempts to remove destructive alien species from an island.

Read that last paragraph very carefully.