Genuine question here, but why not use dogs for this? Is it because dogs might be too heavy and trigger a mine? What is the activation weight of a landmine?
Because rats will keep at it for longer. These particular rats are probably bigger than some tiny dogs, but a rat is a forager, so it can be motivated to keep this up for hours. This behaviour is not so close to what a dog needs to do to eat, so it would do it to please but lose motivation eventually.
Well that's what I remember reading some years ago anyway. I guess a dog would keep going if you made a fuss of him, but you don't want to go over to the middle of the minefield to do that.
But dogs are trained to sniff truffles and definitely stick to it for long, and the process (sniff around, signal to handler, get reward, repeat) seems the same.
I'm no longer sure it is accurate. Looking at their website APOPO now actually use dogs as well. They say that rats and dogs are complementary, but they give an advantage of the dogs but not of the rats
The logistics of the rats are cheaper. But the cost basis is probably always going to be the trainers. A trainer's time is much more costly than a dog's needs.
Pretty much. Furthermore, investment is much smaller, upkeep much lower, transportation easier. And since rats live faster, and shorter, lives, you can get new batch of mine detector rats sooner than you would with dogs. Even under optimal conditions.
This means that if something bad happens, say death of multiple animals due to disease or unfortunate accident. The replacement can arrive much sooner.
The downside is that you have to replace them much more often. But the positives outweigh negatives.
Depends on the mine design but generally you need to be able to apply somewhere around 4-5PSI to the trigger to set one off. General designs are made to be buried after arming so it wouldn't do to have a very light trigger mechanism.
no idea where to find it again or how accurate it is but i watched a documentary about these rats some years ago and it said that they're small enough to be able to navigate minefields without triggering the mines.
How much energy could possibly be stored in one of those containers? Enough to drive a car 100km? (talk about range anxiety...)
I ask because I know that Hydrogen has terrible energy density per unit of volume, even at scary high levels of pressure (Google says 5.6 MJ/L for compressed hydrogen gas at 700 bar pressure). Compare that with gasoline which is 32 MJ/L (To be clear, I'm not advocating for gasoline as storage medium of energy, just showing the contrast).
Aren’t these fuel cells? Not gaseous hydrogen you combust?
They should be pretty high density from my googling, and they were a core shuttle technology.
“In common energy sources, the energy density (specific energy) is rough as follows: hydrogen fuel (142Mj/Kg) > natural gas (55Mj/Kg) > petrol (46Mj/Kg) > coal (30Mj/Kg) > lithium batteries (generally no more than 1.8Mj/Kg)”
1 kg of hydrogen is roughly 40 kwh of energy - lets assume 50% efficiency to electricity, to reach the energy of a Tesla battery (roughly 100 kwh) you’d need roughly 5 kg of hydrogen. That seems extremely viable as a power source for a car, it can’t be that difficult to compress a few kilograms of hydrogen into a tank..
Hydrogen at 20C and 1 ATM (ambient gas, basically) has a density of 0.083 kg/m³. So, a 1 cubic meter tank (about the size of a large refrigerator) would have .083 kg of hydrogen at ambient temperature and pressure. If you could increase the density (via increasing pressure, for example) 60x, that would be ~5 KG in a 1 cubic meter tank. 60 ATM is about 800 PSI, or about the pressure of a CO2 cartridge. From Wikipedia, though, car companies are trying to amp the pressure way up to 10x that, presumably to get the tank size down or increase the total energy.
It is literally an amogus.. an among us crewmate in the exact format of the meme
Like the ultimate case of pareidolia it has been spotted in trashcans, egyptian hieroglyphs as the god Medjed, now here. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was fake due to this meme alone but the sources I see all look completely legit, the image credit guy alone seems almost famous in wikipedia
I must say I don't follow you at all. The two eyes makes it look nothing like an astronaut or the amogus crewmate. The key visual there is a uniform visor, not two circles.
Primarily the two legs, no arms, and backpack
Yeah you’re right there are two eyes which doesnt line up but the Internet went crazy for the amogus hieroglyph which also had eyes
Who knows what a conspiracy theorist thinks? But honestly the fact that geoglyph construction techniques seem to have evolved over at least several hundred years to become ever clearer does seem to be a(n even stronger) point against. If it was aliens, wouldn't they have had the perfect method from the start? In fact, if it was actually aliens, why would they not just burn the images into the soil from orbit with a laser instead of laboriously piling up rocks?
>In fact, if it was actually aliens, why would they not just burn the images into the soil from orbit with a laser instead of laboriously piling up rocks?
They may have tried and accidentally destroyed all the other test planets with their death Star.
My recollection is that the main hypothesis among these crowds (where's the conspiracy?) is that the lines are human made, but in response to 'visiters'.
