Don't kill that rat!! Scientists in the US have developed a novel system for detecting landmines by training rats equipped with GPS and wireless rucksacks to sniff out explosives and map them for destruction.

A team from Bucknell University has trained Rattus test subjects to identify chemicals that leak into the ground from land mines and to circle around them. With palm sized backpacks that hold GPS and a wireless transmitter, the rats receive an electronic reward as incentive.

This backpack transmitter allows for the animals to be tracked on a laptop which uses a simple icon based interface designed for people who may have little to no experience using a computer. It maps out potential land mines, will produce a map for the site's clearance, and identify safe routes through the area.

"This is something that could drop out of the sky and give you everything you need to train rodents to sniff out land mines, even if the people who are using it can't read or write," said Kevin Myers, associate professor of psychology at Bucknell University.

"Some people think we are sending off rats to blow up mines, and that's absolutely not the case. The process is similar to how bomb-sniffing dogs are trained. We need to train the rats to regard that odor as significant by associating it with a food reward."

An airborne army of mine-sniffing rodents might sound like science fiction, but with an estimated 20,000 people killed by landmines around the world each year, and many times that number maimed, mankind's most common mammalian associate's ubiquity could prove useful.