Rats can discriminate between Japanese and Dutch

We note the tenuous connection to Japan in this one, but are picking it up out of sheer fascination. A study has shown that rats can be trained to distinguish between Japanese and Dutch using the respective languages' rhythms. As Cory @ BoingBoing comments, "If this is perfected and the black plague comes back, warring linguistic groups could use this to deploy targeted biowar vectors. I'm sure there are other applications as well, of course. But: Dutch-seeking plague-rats -- w00t!"

[Read: Yahoo! News]