Have you hear the one about the scientist who set out to alleviate diseases associated with menopause and found a solution for world hunger? No, really.

Scientist Loretta Mayer, a researcher at Northern Arizona University, along with colleagues there and at the University of Arizona, discovered a a nontoxic chemical technology causes infertility in rats.

And what does making rats infertile have to do with solving world hunger, one might ask?

Well, every year millions of rats eat or damage food that millions of hungry people would like to eat. In other words, cutting down on the rat population would mean less food lost to foraging rats, which in turn would mean an increased food supply for millions of hungry people around the world, particularly in places like Asia and Africa.

Rodents end up depriving humans of up to 50 percent of pre-harvest rice crops.

If rice production were to increase by 10 percent, "this would feed about 380 million people a year," Mayer said in a statement. "We can easily increase rice production by 10 percent by reducing rodent fertility in half."

Mayer said she found that low, nontoxic doses of something called CD in mice sped the menopausal process thus making them infertile. She dubbed this new animal model of accelerated menopause "mouseopause."

Mayer and her colleagues developed a product called Contra-Pest that is a more humane alternative to poisons, they say.