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It’s shocking enough to see a rat scurrying across your kitchen floor, but what if that "rat" was REALLY a remote-controlled spy? And even better, what if it wasn’t a robot disguised as a rat, but a REAL rodent, being operated from a distance by remote control?

At a laboratory at the State University of New York, researchers are working on creating just that. Rats have an excellent sense of smell, so cyborg rats could be trained to detect the scent of land mines. This wouldn’t even be a danger to the rats, since they are too lightweight to detonate them.
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Researchers have discovered that rats can be made to communicate telepathically across long distances. Scientists trained rats in North Carolina and Brazil to work together to solve problems in return for a drink of water. In the first experiment they had to press the correct lever corresponding to a particular indicator light–in the second they had to distinguish between wide and narrow openings.

Electrodes picked up the brain activity of the first rat and fed it over the internet into the brain of its partner, which had the same levers in its cage but received no visual cues about which one to push. The best rats received telepathic messages from their encoder partners 70% of the time.
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