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Rats with backpacks could help rescue earthquake survivors | CNN

Published

3 years ago

October 24, 2022

Rats with backpacks could help rescue earthquake survivors | CNN

CNN
—

Buildings don’t collapse fairly often – however after they do, it’s catastrophic for these trapped inside. Pure disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes can degree total cities, and for the search and rescue groups looking for survivors, it’s a painstaking job.

However an unlikely savior is being skilled as much as assist out: rats.

The venture, conceived of by Belgian non-profit APOPO, is kitting out rodents with tiny, high-tech backpacks to assist first responders seek for survivors amongst rubble in catastrophe zones.

“Rats are usually fairly curious and wish to discover – and that’s key for search and rescue,” says Donna Kean, a behavioral analysis scientist and chief of the venture.

Along with their adventurous spirit, their small dimension and glorious sense of odor make rats good for finding issues in tight areas, says Kean.

The rats are at present being skilled to search out survivors in a simulated catastrophe zone. They need to first find the goal particular person in an empty room, pull a change on their vest that triggers a beeper, after which return to base, the place they’re rewarded with a deal with.

Whereas the rodents are nonetheless within the early levels of coaching, APOPO is collaborating with the Eindhoven College of Expertise to develop a backpack, which is provided with a video digital camera, two-way microphone, and placement transmitter to assist first responders talk with survivors.

“Along with the backpack and the coaching, the rats are extremely helpful for search and rescue,” says Kean.

APOPO has been coaching canine and rats at its base in Tanzania within the scent detection of landmines and tuberculosis for over a decade. Its packages use African Large Pouched Rats, which have an extended lifespan in captivity of round eight years in comparison with the 4 years of the frequent brown rat.

Whereas the search and rescue venture solely formally launched in April 2021, when Kean joined the staff, APOPO had been making an attempt to get the concept off the bottom for years however lacked funding and a search and rescue associate to help it. However when volunteer search and rescue group GEA approached APOPO in 2017 about the opportunity of utilizing rats in its missions, the staff started exploring prospects.

A key element to the search and rescue mission was the expertise to permit first responders to speak with victims by way of the rats. APOPO didn’t have this – till electrical engineer Sander Verdiesen acquired concerned.

Seeking to “apply expertise to enhance lives” throughout his grasp’s research at Eindhoven College of Expertise, Verdiesen interned with APOPO in 2019 and was tasked with creating the primary prototype of the rat backpack, to assist rescuers get a greater thought of what was happening inside catastrophe zones.

The prototype consisted of a 3D-printed plastic container with a video digital camera that despatched stay footage to a receiver module on a laptop computer, whereas additionally saving a high-quality model on an SD card. It hooked up to the rats with a neoprene vest, the identical materials that’s used for scuba fits.

Verdiesen flew to Tanzania to check out the gear and says that originally, the rats “didn’t actually know easy methods to cope with it” however tailored shortly. “By the top, they have been simply operating round with the backpack on, no drawback in any respect,” he provides.

With the backpacks working “higher than anticipated,” Verdiesen continued to refine the design even after his internship ended, as a volunteer.

However sizing down expertise and adapting it for catastrophe zones hasn’t been straightforward.

GPS can’t penetrate the dense rubble and particles of collapsed buildings, says Verdeisen. Another is the Inertial Measurement Unit, a location tracker used within the heels of firefighters’ boots.

“When you’re strolling, your foot goes to be nonetheless each step or so – that’s the place you’ll be able to recalibrate. With the rats, we’re but to search out that,” he says. Different engineers are engaged on comparable initiatives, so he’s hopeful they will discover a answer.

The backpack currently contains a video camera, but APOPO hopes to also include a location tracker and two-way microphone.

Verdeisen can also be making an attempt to pack extra expertise into the subsequent model, corresponding to a two-way microphone, whereas lowering its dimension. Weighing round 140 grams (4.9 ounces), the prototype was twice as heavy as initially meant – though Verdeisen says that bulkiness was extra of a problem, at 10 centimeters lengthy (3.9 inches) and 4 centimeters deep (1.6 inches).

“The rats have been strolling up towards one thing that they might usually be capable to go underneath, and abruptly they will’t anymore,” he explains.

To make it “as small as potential” with out dropping any performance, Verdeisen plans to combine all the things onto a single printed circuit board, which is able to release more room. This upgraded model of the backpack ought to be prepared later this 12 months, and he hopes in the future it may well assist first responders “to find any individual that might in any other case not be rescued.”

In the meantime, in Tanzania, Kean is rising the complexity of the rats’ coaching atmosphere, “to make it extra like what they could encounter in actual life.” That features including industrial appears like drilling to imitate actual emergencies.

To date, the outcomes are promising: from her observations, Kean says the rats are responding effectively to the more and more troublesome simulations: “They should be tremendous assured in any atmosphere, underneath any circumstances, and that’s one thing that these rats are naturally good at.”

Dealt with from beginning, the rats are uncovered to a wide range of environments, sights, sounds, and other people as a part of a “habituation course of,” which makes their gradual publicity to extra excessive conditions much less demanding, in accordance with Kean.

As animals are on the heart of APOPO’s initiatives and missions, welfare is a precedence. The animals are skilled in 15-minute classes 5 days every week, and stay alone or with same-sex siblings in house cages, which can also be the place they stay out their days as soon as they retire from working life.

Behavioral research scientist Donna Kean (pictured) says the rats are friendly, sociable, and easy to work with.

Consuming a food regimen of contemporary fruit and greens, additionally they get every day playtime in a custom-built playroom – though, for the search and rescue rats, coaching could be very comparable, “simply with just a little little bit of path,” says Kean.

This system remains to be in improvement, however Kean estimates it should take at the very least 9 to 12 months to coach every rat.

For the subsequent stage of coaching, Kean says the staff will create “ranges to imitate a number of flooring of a collapsed constructing” and transfer nearer to “actual world situations.” As soon as the rats are assured in additional advanced environments, the venture will transfer to Turkey, the place GEA is predicated, for additional preparation in additional reasonable environments. If that goes effectively, then the rats would probably enter real-life conditions.

For now, although, Kean and the staff in Tanzania are centered on getting the rats by means of their first part of coaching – and hopefully in the future, into the sphere.

“Even when our rats discover only one survivor at a particles website, I feel we might be pleased to comprehend it’s made a distinction someplace,” says Kean.

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As Harvard Battles Trump, Its President Will Take a 25% Pay Cut

Published

12 hours ago

May 14, 2025

Press Room

As Harvard Battles Trump, Its President Will Take a 25% Pay Cut

Harvard University, which is clashing with the Trump administration over its academic independence and the withdrawal of billions of dollars in research funding, said on Wednesday that its president had chosen to cut his own pay by 25 percent starting later this year.

The university has not disclosed specifics about its compensation package for the president, Alan M. Garber, who became Harvard’s permanent leader last year. His recent predecessors were paid around $1 million a year.

Whatever it amounts to in dollar terms, though, the pay reduction is a symbolic gesture compared with the scale of the university’s fight with the federal government, which has already moved to block more than $2.6 billion in funding for Harvard.

A university spokesman, Jonathan L. Swain, said Dr. Garber’s salary would be reduced starting July 1, when Harvard’s next fiscal year begins. The university, which has already halted new hiring and suspended merit raises for many employees, said that other Harvard leaders were planning contributions to the school.

The university acknowledged Dr. Garber’s decision the day after it expanded its lawsuit against the Trump administration.

The government made a range of intrusive demands of Harvard last month, asserting that the university had, among other things, not done enough to combat antisemitism. The university has sharply contested those accusations. Then last week, Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said that Harvard would not be eligible for any more federal grants.

Legal experts have cast doubt on the viability of Ms. McMahon’s decree, and many of them believe that Harvard has a strong legal case to reverse the cuts the Trump administration has already made. Even so, Harvard, which has routinely received hundreds of millions of dollars a year in federal research funding, is preparing for turmoil as long as President Trump remains in office.

In the first months of Mr. Trump’s second term, Harvard has already had to scale back or eliminate some research programs, including efforts to study tuberculosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease and radiation sickness, because of federal funding cuts. The university’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, faced with some of the most significant funding losses, is eliminating desktop phones, limiting catering, reducing security and cutting back on purchases of new computers. The school has also cut back on leased office space, slots for doctoral students and a shuttle that ferries employees between offices.

The Crimson, the Harvard campus newspaper, first reported Dr. Garber’s pay decision.

A sense of campus solidarity in the funding fight extends beyond Harvard’s top ranks. Ninety tenured professors have pledged to take 10 percent pay cuts in order to help Harvard, the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, weather the Trump administration’s onslaught. Ryan D. Enos, a professor of government and a leader of the group, said the university had expressed its gratitude.

The group came together, Dr. Enos said, in recognition that some Harvard employees could be harder hit than others by the federal cuts.

In a statement, the professors, some of whom have not been named publicly, said their offer to work for less pay signaled “our commitment as faculty members to use means at our disposal to protect the university and, especially, staff and students who do not have the same protections.”

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Qatar orders up to 210 Boeing jets during Trump visit

Published

15 hours ago

May 14, 2025

Press Room

Qatar orders up to 210 Boeing jets during Trump visit

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Qatar has agreed to buy up to 210 aircraft from Boeing in what US President Donald Trump hailed as the largest order of jets in the history of the American aerospace company as he visited the Gulf state.

The White House announced economic deals worth more than $243bn as Qatar became the latest oil-rich country to earn plaudits from the president for buying into his “America first” investment policy as he toured the Gulf in pursuit of headline-grabbing business deals.

Qatar Airways, the state-owned national carrier, had agreed to a $96bn deal to acquire up to 210 American-made Boeing 787 Dreamliner and 777X aircraft, the White House said, adding that it was Boeing’s “largest-ever wide-body order”.

“Congratulations to Boeing. Get those planes out there,” Trump said at a signing ceremony with Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, Qatar’s emir. “I just want to thank you. We’ve been friends for a long time.”

Boeing shares were up 2.3 per cent on Wednesday. Airlines often receive a discount off the list price of the aeroplanes they buy.

Other multibillion dollar deals have also been reached in defence, energy and technology, the White House said.

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A federal appeals panel has made enforcing the Voting Rights Act harder in 7 states

Published

16 hours ago

May 14, 2025

Press Room

A federal appeals panel has made enforcing the Voting Rights Act harder in 7 states

A demonstrator carrying a sign that says “VOTING RIGHTS NOW” walks across the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in 2022 in Washington, D.C.

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

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A panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down one of the key remaining ways of enforcing the federal Voting Rights Act in seven mainly Midwestern states.

For decades, private individuals and groups have brought the majority of lawsuits for enforcing the landmark law’s Section 2 protections against racial discrimination in the election process.

But in a 2-1 ruling released Wednesday, the three-judge panel found that Section 2 cannot be enforced by lawsuits from private parties under a separate federal statute known as Section 1983.

That statute gives individuals the right to sue state and local government officials for violating their civil rights. Section 1983 stems from the Ku Klux Klan Act that Congress passed after the Civil War to protect Black people in the South from white supremacist violence, and voting rights advocates have considered it an antidote to a controversial 2023 decision by a different federal appeals panel that made it harder to enforce Section 2 in the 8th Circuit.

That earlier panel found that Section 2 is not privately enforceable because the Voting Rights Act does not explicitly name private individuals and groups. Only the head of the Justice Department can bring these types of lawsuits, that panel concluded.

A person holds a sign that says "VOTING RIGHTS NOW" during a peace walk in Washington, D.C., on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2022.

The majority of the panel that released Wednesday’s opinion came to the same conclusion.

“Because [the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2] does not unambiguously confer an individual right, the plaintiffs do not have a cause of action under [Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code] to enforce [Section 2] of the Act,” wrote Circuit Judge Raymond Gruender, who was nominated by former President George W. Bush and joined in the opinion by Circuit Judge Jonathan Kobes, a nominee of President Trump.

In a dissenting opinion, however, Chief Circuit Judge Steven Colloton, also a Bush nominee, pointed out the long history of private individuals and groups suing to enforce Section 2’s legal protections against any inequalities in the opportunities voters of colors have to elect preferred candidates in districts where voting is racially polarized.

“Since 1982, private plaintiffs have brought more than 400 actions based on [Section 2] that have resulted in judicial decisions. The majority concludes that all of those cases should have been dismissed because [Section 2] of the Voting Rights Act does not confer a voting right,” Colloton wrote.

Under the current Trump administration, the Justice Department has stepped away from Section 2 cases that had begun during the Biden administration.

The 8th Circuit includes Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. The latest ruling comes out of a North Dakota redistricting lawsuit by the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Spirit Lake Tribe. Citing Section 1983 as a basis for bringing the case as private groups, the tribal nations challenged a map of state legislative voting districts, which was approved by North Dakota’s Republican-controlled legislature after the 2020 census.

In a part of the state where voting is racially polarized, the tribal nations argued, the redistricting lines drawn by the state lawmakers reduce the opportunity for Native American voters to elect candidates of their choice.

“For the first time in over 30 years, there are zero Native Americans serving in the North Dakota state Senate today because of the way the 2020 redistricting lines were configured,” Mark Gaber, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center, which is representing the tribal nations, said during a court hearing in October 2024.

How a Supreme Court justice's paragraph put the Voting Rights Act in more danger

A lower court struck down the redistricting plan for violating Section 2 by diluting the collective power of Native American voters in northeastern North Dakota.

But the state’s Republican secretary of state, Michael Howe, appealed the lower court’s ruling to the 8th Circuit, arguing that, contrary to decades of precedent, Section 1983 does not allow private individuals and groups to bring this kind of lawsuit.

Since 2021, Republican officials in Arkansas and Louisiana have made similar novel arguments in redistricting lawsuits after Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court appointee, issued a single-paragraph opinion that said lower courts have considered whether private individuals can sue an “open question.” For this North Dakota lawsuit, 14 GOP state attorneys general signed on to a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that private parties don’t have a right to sue with Section 2 claims.

In a separate Arkansas-based case before the 8th Circuit, GOP state officials have also questioned whether there is a private right of action under another part of the Voting Rights Acts — Section 208, which states that voters who need assistance to vote because of a disability or inability to read or write can generally receive help from a person of their choice.

Many legal experts consider this questioning of a private right of action as the prelude to the next potential showdown over the Voting Rights Act at the Supreme Court, where multiple rulings by the court’s conservative majority have eroded the law’s protections over the past decade.

Edited by Benjamin Swasey