full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Bart Weetjens: How I taught rats to sniff out land mines

Unscramble the Blue Letters


So how does it work? You have a cassette with 10 samples. You put these 10 samples at once in the cage. An animal only needs two hundredths of a second to discriminate the scent, so it goes extremely fast. Here it's already at the third smlape. This is a positive sample. It gets a click sound and comes for the food reward. And by doing so, very fast, we can have like a second-line oiopnin to see which patients are positive, which are negative. Just as an indication, whereas a microscopist can process 40 samples in a day, a rat can process the same amunot of samples in seven mintues only. A cage like this — (Applause) A cage like this — provided that you have rats, and we have now currently 25 tuberculosis rats — a cage like this, operating throughout the day, can process 1,680 smpelas. Can you imagine the ptoiental offspring applications — etnnorimnaevl detection of pollutants in soils, customs applications, detection of illicit goods in coaennrits and so on.

Open Cloze


So how does it work? You have a cassette with 10 samples. You put these 10 samples at once in the cage. An animal only needs two hundredths of a second to discriminate the scent, so it goes extremely fast. Here it's already at the third ______. This is a positive sample. It gets a click sound and comes for the food reward. And by doing so, very fast, we can have like a second-line _______ to see which patients are positive, which are negative. Just as an indication, whereas a microscopist can process 40 samples in a day, a rat can process the same ______ of samples in seven _______ only. A cage like this — (Applause) A cage like this — provided that you have rats, and we have now currently 25 tuberculosis rats — a cage like this, operating throughout the day, can process 1,680 _______. Can you imagine the _________ offspring applications — _____________ detection of pollutants in soils, customs applications, detection of illicit goods in __________ and so on.

Solution


  1. samples
  2. potential
  3. minutes
  4. containers
  5. environmental
  6. sample
  7. amount
  8. opinion

Original Text


So how does it work? You have a cassette with 10 samples. You put these 10 samples at once in the cage. An animal only needs two hundredths of a second to discriminate the scent, so it goes extremely fast. Here it's already at the third sample. This is a positive sample. It gets a click sound and comes for the food reward. And by doing so, very fast, we can have like a second-line opinion to see which patients are positive, which are negative. Just as an indication, whereas a microscopist can process 40 samples in a day, a rat can process the same amount of samples in seven minutes only. A cage like this — (Applause) A cage like this — provided that you have rats, and we have now currently 25 tuberculosis rats — a cage like this, operating throughout the day, can process 1,680 samples. Can you imagine the potential offspring applications — environmental detection of pollutants in soils, customs applications, detection of illicit goods in containers and so on.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
food reward 3
click sound 2
animal learns 2
hero rats 2
dar es 2
es salaam 2
case detection 2
detection rates 2
saved lots 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
dar es salaam 2
case detection rates 2

Important Words


  1. amount
  2. animal
  3. applause
  4. applications
  5. cage
  6. cassette
  7. click
  8. containers
  9. customs
  10. day
  11. detection
  12. discriminate
  13. environmental
  14. extremely
  15. fast
  16. food
  17. goods
  18. hundredths
  19. illicit
  20. imagine
  21. indication
  22. microscopist
  23. minutes
  24. negative
  25. offspring
  26. operating
  27. opinion
  28. patients
  29. pollutants
  30. positive
  31. potential
  32. process
  33. put
  34. rat
  35. rats
  36. reward
  37. sample
  38. samples
  39. scent
  40. soils
  41. sound
  42. tuberculosis
  43. work