We have posts today about self driving cars (that cost billions in development) and rat driven cars (that probably cost under a thousand). Rats have a native understanding of snow, rain and other bad weather.

And poor distance vision.

http://www.ratbehavior.org/perception.htm

Rat glasses

Well... that’s the annoying thing about horses. We had self-driving transportation for the past 10,000 years.

Atrocious ethics aside... I do wonder what the progress of horse-brain autonomous vehicles would look like.

I’d prefer my car doesn’t get spooked by cyclists and loud noises.

what are you saying? self driving rat cars?

It would be pretty interesting to scale up the experiment. Making a control scheme for rats in a full-size car wouldn’t be too hard. But you might have to progressively train them on larger and larger vehicles.

Careful not to let it out of the lab though, otherwise it might become aware of how much power it’s been given. Most powerful rat in history. :)

Imagine being a rat in a full-size car. It must feel like you’re driving a house.

talking about the rat race

I'm not sure exactly why but this question has left me breathless in hysterical laughter.

you’re laughing now, but wait until uber will be driven by an all-rat tight knit crew of hackers

Footage: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VYErLcG6aCQ

So basically the character of the mouse Stuart Little , which is a nice children's book that is a classic and was written by E.B. White, does have a limited basis in reality?

My therapist: rats driving tiny cars aren't real, they can't hurt you

Rats driving tiny cars:

Make a rat city with houses where they can sleep and different buildings they can go to for food and water, but make it so they can only drive to different buildings.

Existing rat populations would never allow this due to NIMBYism and would use zoning to stop it.

Imagine if they teach them how to pilot drones. They’ll be like Air Force pilots, complete with attitude. Not just well-adjusted but also more willing to take risks. My first and only skydiving experience I had an adrenaline high that lasted all day, with visions of more skydiving and other types of adventures. Sadly, I ended up settling back into my quiet, boring but peaceful life.

A short while back I would have thought this to be intuitive. I love to drive, and have wanted to do it since my teens.

But then my kids and their friends came along. They don't love to drive! No cruising Main street. They do their socializing on the phone.

So maybe the rats are just old school?

This is the best experiment. I can now live happy knowing rats have learned how to drive a small rat car to deal with stress. It’s no wonder, it looks like a lot of fun for them

Cool ! Can it be weaponized ? I mean, could it do better than some hypothetical tiny AI controlled robots in, e.g., earthquakes rescue missions ?

They had pidgeon guided bombs and missiles in ww2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

I laughed a bit when I saw the project head... Of course that's who.

They were never built, but during that period people had absolutely wild ideas. Great Britain was considering building 10 kton nuclear mines, to be buried along the borders of Germany and to be detonated in case of a Soviet invasion.

Even if buried, those mines would just end up freezing, so some bright mind came up with the idea of putting live chicken inside them, to keep the temperature up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock

The bat bombs were tested, with entirely predictable results. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

Pigeons were also used for ocean search and rescue.

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1980/10/02/Coast-Guard-clips-wi...

When this came up the other week I thought of little mice driving around the fields in their mini tractors plucking weeds out of the ground with no herbicides sprayed.

That's not what weaponized means..

That was a joke...

This headline makes me happy. I want more of science to be tiny-car based.

Did anybody read the paper?

What was the activity pattern they used to establish the baseline measurements for the hormones?

So the driver of my question above is what impact age has on the hormone measurements. As far as I can tell, they didn't have groups that lived in each environment without the activity training.

If you click the DOI link at the bottom of the article it'll take you to a page where you can download the PDF.

Thanks. I swear I looked last time this was discussed and there was a nice fat charge to download it.

After healing cancer, diabetis and alzheimers in rats, now we are giving them cars.

This is going too far!