Apparently most rats survived hurricane Sandy's wrath on…

Apparently most rats survived hurricane Sandy's wrath on New York City's subway tunnels, evading the anticipated Ratpocalypse. Rats are good swimmers, and they're also really good at navigating with their whiskers, which flick eight times per second as they survey their environment. Could humans lean to take advantage of the sort of sensory input? Well to find out, researchers attached a plastic 30 cm-long “whistle” with sensors to the index bingos of blindfolded subjects. And they placed two poles just off to the side and in front of the subject, with one pole slightly closer to the subject. Using their whiskers, the subjects had to judge which pole was future away. By moving their hands together across the front of them they could feel which hand's whisker touched a pole first, and so they determined which pole was closer to them. During the first day of testing objects could accurately determine a position difference of only 8 cm. And by the next day of testing they improved to detect a difference of just 3 cm, with some subjects able to detect a difference of only 1 cm. Of course, blind people already use canes to survey their environment. The hand-whisker technique though could fine-tune such efforts.