Rats | featured news

This week's power outage at Japan's tsunami-crippled nuclear plant may have been caused by a rat Masayuki Ono, spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, says a 15-centimeter (6-inch) rat was found dead Wednesday near a switchboard. He says the rat may be linked to the power failure, but that more investigation is needed to be sure.

Two rats — one in North Carolina, the other in Brazil — worked together on a task by communicating telepathically, thanks to implants in their brain. Electrical signals from a "leader" rat’s brain were collected, encoded and then zapped into the "follower" rat’s cortex in the form of an electrical signal. The follower rat then pressed one of two levers based on a light visible only to the leader rat. The Duke University experiment is the first time two animals have collaborated through such an artificial link, and shows that the mammal brain can be trained to act on electrical signals from another animal.

Paralysed rats have been able to walk again when their spinal cords were bathed in chemicals and zapped with electricity, scientists have shown.

Notorious as the first spot in Alaska despoiled by rats,  a remote island has a new name to celebrate its rodent-free status.- but it may be harder for some to pronounce. The 10-square-mile island will now be known as Hawadax (pronounced "How-ah-thaa"), the traditional Aleut name it was given before a Japanese sailing ship ran aground there in the late 1700s and triggered Alaska's first rat invasion, state and federal officials said on Wednesday.

Bangladesh on Wednesday awarded a farmer who killed more than 83,000 rats and launched a monthlong campaign nationwide to kill millions more, to protect crops and reduce the need for food imports....

After two centuries of an epic infestation, Alaska's Rat Island finally may merit a name change. The island, part of a national wildlife refuge in the sprawling Aleutian chain, appears to be pest-free for the first time since rats overran it after a Japanese sailing ship wrecked there in the late 1700s.