Rat research a no-brainer

– Sometimes life really can be a rat race.

US scientists have reported successfully training a group of rodents to drive tiny cars in exchange for bits of Froot Loops Cereal and found that learning the task lowered their stress levels.

Their study not only demonstrates how sophisticated rat brains are, but could one day help develop new non-pharmaceutical forms of treatment for mental illness, senior author Kelly Lambert of the University of Richmond said.

She had long been interested in neuroplasticity – how the brain changes in response to experience and challenges – and particularly wanted to explore how well rats that were housed in more natural settings (“enriched environments”) performed against those kept in labs.

She and colleagues modified a robot car kit by adding a clear plastic food container to form a driver compartment with an aluminium plate placed on the bottom.

A copper wire was threaded horizontally across the cab to form three bars: left, centre and right.

When a rat placed itself on the aluminium floor and touched the wire, the circuit was complete and the car moved in the direction selected.

Seventeen rats were trained over several months to drive around an arena 150cm by 60cm made of plexiglass.

Writing in the journal Behavioural Brain Research, the researchers said the animals could be taught to steer in complex navigational patterns.

As she had suspected, Lambert found those kept in stimuli-rich environments performed “so much’ better than their lab rat counterparts.

The biggest takeaway was the potential for new avenues of treatment the work opened up for people suffering from mental health conditions. –

Washington

Jakarta

Adesign flaw, inadequate pilot training and poor flight crew performance contributed to a Boeing jet crashing in Indonesia last year, killing all 189 people on board, investigators said yesterday, in what one aviation analyst called a “damning” report.

The Lion Air disaster was followed months later by a second crash – involving the same model of aircraft – when an Ethiopian Airlines plane went down with 157 people aboard, leading to the global grounding of Boeing’s entire 737 MAX fleet.

The crashes threw a spotlight on the MAX model’s manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system (MCAS), an anti-stall mechanism, that pilots in both planes had struggled to control as the jets careered downwards.

Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee said yesterday, Boeing’s design of the anti-stall system and its certification by US regulators was “inadequate”.

The MCAS was vulnerable to a single sensor that it relied on for inputs, and 737 MAX pilots were not properly briefed on how to handle a malfunction, it said in its final report on the crash.

“The aircraft flight manual and flight crew training did not include information about MCAS,” it said.

A sensor on the doomed jet’s system was “miscalibrated” and the problem wasn’t caught by Lion Air maintenance crews after the plane’s previous flight also experienced loss-of-control problems.

The emergency was not “effectively managed” by the crew, who had previous performance issues, it added.

An earlier report released by international regulators said the

We need to look at types of tasks and respect that behaviour can change our neurochemistry.

Kelly Lambert University of Richmond