Word: mining
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...town is pretty close to Silicon Valley, and most of my neighbors make their living in technology, while I make mine writing about it. All of us, though, worship at the altar of bright and shiny things. These days, it's the impending launch of Apple's next-generation iPhone that has the faithful davening. If the whispers of pending miracles are to be believed, this new phone could end up becoming the next big "platform...
...supervises the training of the rats and their handlers. "You can train them to do exactly what you want them to do." The project, run by an organization called Apopo, which is funded by the Flemish government in Belgium, is proving so effective that a new batch of mine-sniffing rats is scheduled to be deployed in Angola later this year...
...train and transport to clearance sites, cheap to feed, and resistant to many of the tropical diseases to which dogs succumb. In the field, they are quick and methodical. Thirty-six rats trained in Tanzania are working on the project so far, and have already cleared thousands of mines across the country. "Two rats can clear a 200-square-meter area in one hour," says Mkumbo. "It takes one [human] de-miner two weeks to do the same area." And all that the rats ask in return is tasty food. When Samo signals the presence of a mine by scratching...
...work with anyone, so long as they are fed. Instead, it is the handlers who have grown attached to the rats. "Our economy used to be poor because of landmines, but now the rats are making a difference," says Alberto Jorge Zacarias, a handler who previously worked with mine-detecting dogs for eight years. "They are heroes. One day I will see my country free of landmines...
...friend of mine at the White House complained to me the other day that the Bush administration and the Pentagon until this day believe we are fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq. They "stand up" al-Qaeda as the enemy in Iraq, he said, even behind closed doors. In the teeth of the facts, they ignore that the enemy we're fighting in Iraq is a half a dozen homegrown insurgencies, an incipient civil war, and criminal gangs. They ignore the fact that although a handful of Osama bin Laden's followers showed up in Iraq after the invasion...