These Huge Rats Can Sniff Out Land Mines | National Geographic

2m read

·Nov 11, 2024

We bring the Gambian Jan rats from Africa to sniff out the landmines in Cambodia. There is a two million landmines spread out in Cambodia. Two hundred to three hundred people got injured by landmines and you SOS every year.

These rats look similar to the rodents we know; the difference is that these are white rats. They do not see the rats that are used to be in our houses, so they are bigger than the rodents that we know. They are faster than a human. Why are they faster? Because the rats are only going for TNT smell, and the human using his metal detector is going for all kinds of metals.

In a 5 by 20 meters box, a trained rat can finish the box in 16 to 25 minutes only. If we use the manual metal detector, it can take two days or three days to finish. For us, just leave your rat if you get free for quite some time, and then we get, oh! We can tell a dog to sit; it can sit. You tell a dog to go; it can go. But a rat cannot understand all those kinds of things.

So, we only communicate with them by using a clicker. When the rat smells TNT, it starts to scratch, and then I have to click and give food to the rats. By the size, I feel very, very emotional. I got very, very, very, very, very excited. I don’t know who or who is who. I don’t know. They not only click for food; now I want to touch the rats.

If I see four regions right on the rat that is hit by a car, then it pains me a lot. They laugh like his brother or her sister. Sometimes they carry like his baby or her baby. As we know, landmines are dangerous for our lives. If our rats are able to discover landmines, then they save lives.

I hope that in the future, the people of Cambodia will get enough land to live and improve their lives.

The "Most Money Raised" game

Collision theory and the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution | Kinetics | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

View All

Worked examples: interpreting definite integrals in context | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

Julia’s revenue is r of t thousand dollars per month, where t is the month of the year. Julia had made three thousand dollars in the first month of the year. What does three plus the definite integral from one to five of r of t dt equals 19 mean? We have …

Partial derivative of a parametric surface, part 1

So we’ve just computed a vector-valued partial derivative of a vector-valued function, but the question is, what does this mean? What does this jumble of symbols actually mean in a, you know, more intuitive geometric setting? That has everything to do wi…

Copán Ruinas Was a Thriving City - Until One Day, It Went Away | National Geographic

[Music] Copan Ruinas is one of the most mysterious and spectacular cities of the Maya civilization. At its height, between 250 to 900 AD, approximately 27,000 mile IFFT. Here, thereafter, the civilization mysteriously crumbled, and the Copan Ruinas were l…

Are You Lightest In The Morning?

[Applause] So recently a friend of mine says to me, “Derek, you know you’re heaviest at night before you go to bed and lightest in the morning when you wake up.” Okay, but that doesn’t really seem to make sense. “Of course it does. Overnight, you’re not…

How can we protect the polar regions and fight climate change? We went to Paris to find out

Well, I have made it to the city of love, and here is a crazy story for you. I’ve just been on a surfing trip; that’s why I’m dressed for the beach, not for Paris. A National Geographic called me and they said, “You need to cut your surfing trip short and…

New Hampshire Summer Learning Series Session 2: Unlock Potential with “Khanmigo Teacher Tools”

All right. Good morning everyone! Welcome back to our summer learning series for New Hampshire. Today we are going to do a deep dive with Kigo Teacher Tools. And you know what, I just realized I hope I shared my sound, but we’ll see when we play this vide…

These Huge Rats Can Sniff Out Land Mines | National Geographic

More Articles