Researchers at Duke gave rats an extra sense, and all it took was a little bit of brain surgery. With external hardware hooked into their brains, rats can see infrared light, and navigate it well enough to find rewards. The research builds on a previous study where Duke University's Miguel Nicolelis and Eric Thompson used a single implanted electrode to give rats a vague sense of the infrared world.

In the first project, the rats had electrodes attached to their sensory cortices, and fed information from a head-mounted infrared sensor, which stimulated part of the brain whenever the rats got closer to a source of infrared light. With this sensor, rats could work their way to a water spout placed below an infrared emitter, but it usually took the rats almost a month to figure out what, exactly, their new sense was telling them.