News Mash-up: Amazing Animals

Magawa, Cambodia's landmine-sniffing 'hero' rat, dies in retirement, age 8 He found more than 100 landmines and explosives in Cambodia before he retired last June. But now Magawa, the African giant pouched rat, has died at age 8. Magawa was the most successful “HeroRAT” used by international charity APOPO. He died over the Jan. 8-9 weekend. APOPO uses trained rats to detect landmines and tuberculosis. “Magawa was in good health and spent most of last week playing with his usual enthusiasm, but towards the weekend he started to slow down, napping more and showing less interest in food in his last days,” the nonprofit organization said in a statement. APOPO said Magawa’s help allowed communities in Cambodia to live, work and play more safely. “Every discovery he made reduced the risk of injury or death for the people of Cambodia,” APOPO said. APOPO began training rats in Belgium in the 1990s. (Reuters) Dogs' brains can tell Spanish from Hungarian Dogs can distinguish between languages, researchers in Hungary found, after playing excerpts from the story The Little Prince in Spanish and Hungarian to a group of 18 canines and examining how their brains reacted. “(In the research) we found for the first time that a nonhuman brain can distinguish (between) languages,” said Laura V. Cuaya of Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, who led the study. All the dogs in the experiment had heard only one of the two languages — either Hungarian or Spanish — from their owners before, allowing researchers to compare how their brain reacted to a highly familiar language and to a completely unfamiliar one. (Reuters) These articles were provided by The Japan Times Alpha.