Health & Science

Our new friend, the rat

They may not be cute and cuddly, but rats have become man’s new best friend, says The Boston Globe. Because they spend their lives foraging for food, rats have supersensitive noses, which scientists have learned to utilize in two new lifesaving projects in Africa. In Mozambique, giant rats have been trained to sniff out thousands of land mines left from previous conflicts. The rats’ “noses are far more sensitive than all current mechanical vapor detectors,” says Havard Bach, a mine-clearing specialist with an international aid organization. Unlike dogs, rats are so light-footed that they do not trigger land mines. Their amazing success in detecting mines may lead them to be employed in other regions in Africa, as well as in Asia and Europe, where millions of mines that remain buried from previous wars kill and maim thousands of people each year. In Tanzania, the rat’s sense of smell is being used as a medical testing device: They sniff saliva samples for traces of tuberculosis. The animals are able to identify early-stage infections that may not be found by a microscope. Rats get a bad rap, says Alberto Jorge Chambe, a rat handler for the Mozambique project, but they’re smarter and friendlier than you might think—and far less expensive than trained dogs. “Rats are usually considered pests or enemies of humanity,” Chambe says. “But rats are helping my country escape the shadow of death.”

How to keep law and order

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If a neighborhood is kept clean and orderly, its inhabitants will respect one another’s property and the law. But if the streets are full of graffiti, litter, and vandalized stores and buildings, residents become contemptuous of social norms and crime will rise. So goes the “broken windows” theory, a controversial notion of law and order taught in police academies, and sometimes cited as a driving force behind the reduction of crime in New York City in the 1990s. Now, a Dutch study is proving that the concept is truer than most social scientists had believed. Behavioral scientist Kees Keizer tested the broken windows theory in a half-dozen kinds of public places, and found that it had a major effect on people’s behavior in every one. If a sidewalk is kept clean, for example, only 33 percent of people will toss an unwanted flier onto the ground; if there’s lots of trash and litter, 69 percent will choose to add to it. Just 13 percent of passers-by will steal money from an envelope left sticking out of a clean mailbox, but 27 percent will steal if the box is covered in graffiti. “It is quite shocking that the mere presence of litter resulted in a doubling of the number of people stealing,” Keizer tells the Los Angeles Times.

The girl without a heart

What would it feel like to have no heartbeat? It’s like being a “fake person,” says D’Zhana Simmons, a 14-year-old girl who lived without a heart in her chest for four months. Last spring, D’Zhana and her family were told that she had an enlarged heart and needed a transplant. She received one, but lived with it for only two days before it had to be removed. While waiting for a new heart, D’Zhana was fitted with an artificial pump that circulated blood throughout her body. She didn’t have a heartbeat in any conventional sense, and remained tethered to the pumping machine for months as doctors waited for a new organ to become available. Using such a device on such a young patient for such a long period—118 days—is unprecedented. It’s “a big deal,” Dr. Peter Wearden tells the Associated Press. “There was no heart in that girl’s body. That is pretty amazing.” D’Zhana has now received a new transplant heart, and will soon leave the hospital.

Is this all part of a TV show?

That modern-day scourge, reality television, has spawned its very own psychosis, says the Associated Press. A growing number of people with mental illness have the delusion that they’re being stalked by reality TV cameras. Dr. Joel Gold of New York’s Bellevue Hospital calls it the “Truman syndrome” after the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show, in which every person in the lead character’s life is an actor and every moment is being broadcast to an unseen audience. In one case, a man walked into a government building and asked officials to arrest the people who were filming him without his consent. In another, a patient believed he was a contestant on a secret game show and that everyone and everything he experienced was part of that show. A third patient became convinced he was living in the computer-generated virtual reality depicted in the film The Matrix. Psychiatrists say it’s not that reality TV or films are causing people to become mentally ill; they’re just providing a new template for delusional people who might, at some other time, have insisted the CIA was monitoring their thoughts.