I love that Magawa's wikipedia article is structured just like a human: Early Life, Career, Retirement and Death.
A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
Stark reminder of how precious and meaningful a life can be - of any creature, no matter how small. We should be nice to all creatures not just humans.
I was recently at a wet lands were there were hundreds of thousands of snow geese making the lake white and blackening the sky, crazy to see and yeah we are blessed with the ability to change the entire Earth, the other guys are just along for the ride
I agree. However, you get insane push back the second you start to mention veganism. And yes, that is a luxury and there large parts of the world where that's not an option, but if you're reading this comment you probably could survive without eating meat.
Sadly demand for heros may increase in the future. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Finland withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty banning personnel mines. And probably more countries will follow.
Wonder how hard it would be to train for diabetes? My under 10yo was just diagnosed with T1DM, a pocket rat sounds like fun and cheaper than a dog which is priced at unobtainium prices for us.
Animals are awesome, land mines are not. I hope we can avoid ever bringing that to our shores. Sadly, I know we now have air-mines (drones) so guess someone has to come up with drone sniffing pidgins or something (though obviously a parked drone probably doesn’t persist as long as a buried stationary mine and a flying drone less so).
RIP Magawa. Animals are wonderful. My grandmother had seizures for the latter part of her life and her doctors were unable to determine the root cause. A Great Dane mix her and my grandfather rescued was able to sense when one a fit was coming on and would lean on her until she was lying down and safe.
Magawa cleared 1,517,711 sq.ft of land. He could work at a pace of 2,808 sq.ft (a doubles tennis court) every 20 minutes. If he maintained that pace, he worked 180.2 hours. Let's assume, with hazardous terrain, he worked 25% that speed on average. If that's the case he worked ~720 hours during a 5-6 year career. A different rat, Ronin, that found more stuff found a total of 124 explosive devices. So Magawa found no more than 1 explosive for every 5 hours and 45 minutes of searching. Or approximately one device every 17.25 tennis courts of searching.
Nobody likes experimenting on animals, but it is use mice or orphans in third world countries. In silico and computational models are just not a good enough analogue for the human body.
I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?
[delayed]
> Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs.
> He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts".
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa
End to life worthy of being envied.
I love that Magawa's wikipedia article is structured just like a human: Early Life, Career, Retirement and Death.
A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
How does one rat mentor another?
Stark reminder of how precious and meaningful a life can be - of any creature, no matter how small. We should be nice to all creatures not just humans.
I was recently at a wet lands were there were hundreds of thousands of snow geese making the lake white and blackening the sky, crazy to see and yeah we are blessed with the ability to change the entire Earth, the other guys are just along for the ride
I agree. However, you get insane push back the second you start to mention veganism. And yes, that is a luxury and there large parts of the world where that's not an option, but if you're reading this comment you probably could survive without eating meat.
Sadly demand for heros may increase in the future. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Finland withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty banning personnel mines. And probably more countries will follow.
Is that their fault or is there maybe a giant reason nearby why they are doing this?
If you visit Siem Reap, you can visit the APOPO visitor centre, and see the rats (and a demonstration!) for yourself. Highly recommended.
- http://apopo.org/support-us/apopo-visitor-center/
I spent the last minute observing in silence, in memory of this remarkable creature. HN sheep, I command thee all, to do the same.
I did. Also, I think i needed this bit of news today.
Wonder how hard it would be to train for diabetes? My under 10yo was just diagnosed with T1DM, a pocket rat sounds like fun and cheaper than a dog which is priced at unobtainium prices for us.
Animals are awesome, land mines are not. I hope we can avoid ever bringing that to our shores. Sadly, I know we now have air-mines (drones) so guess someone has to come up with drone sniffing pidgins or something (though obviously a parked drone probably doesn’t persist as long as a buried stationary mine and a flying drone less so).
War sucks.
From what I've read from rat owners, the worst thing about owning a rat is their short lifespans.
RIP Magawa. Animals are wonderful. My grandmother had seizures for the latter part of her life and her doctors were unable to determine the root cause. A Great Dane mix her and my grandfather rescued was able to sense when one a fit was coming on and would lean on her until she was lying down and safe.
Magawa cleared 1,517,711 sq.ft of land. He could work at a pace of 2,808 sq.ft (a doubles tennis court) every 20 minutes. If he maintained that pace, he worked 180.2 hours. Let's assume, with hazardous terrain, he worked 25% that speed on average. If that's the case he worked ~720 hours during a 5-6 year career. A different rat, Ronin, that found more stuff found a total of 124 explosive devices. So Magawa found no more than 1 explosive for every 5 hours and 45 minutes of searching. Or approximately one device every 17.25 tennis courts of searching.
Real needle in a haystack stuff, wow
These are the creatures we kill with poison and carry experiments on.
Those mice have a sculpture as well[0].
Nobody likes experimenting on animals, but it is use mice or orphans in third world countries. In silico and computational models are just not a good enough analogue for the human body.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mou...
I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?
There has certainly been work on it, but not sure what the status is. Of course, it could be very useful.
From Google, 2019,
https://research.google/blog/learning-to-smell-using-deep-le...
Sounds like the obsession of reinventing trains and trees. Surely training a rat is cheaper than a portable real-time NMR device, right?
Rats are incredible animals, and this is a well deserved honor.
RIP Magawa