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YOUR NEW REALITY
Friday, Oct 2nd, 2009
Insects can now be implanted with electrodes and flown by remote control. Impressive, yes. Obviously there will be both military and civilian applications, but when I watch the below video, and read this story, I can’t help but wonder what the remotely-controlled insect is thinking, when it decides to turn left and down to head for a tasty treat nearby, but instead finds itself turning right and heading upwards. The PETA campaign for humane treatment of insects should be very interesting.
From New Scientist (excerpts) :
The project’s goal is to create fully remote control insects, able to perform tasks such as looking for survivors after a disaster, or acting as the ultimate spy.
A particular series of electrical pulses to the brain causes the beetle to take off. No further stimulation is needed to maintain the flight. Though the average length of flights during trials was just 45 seconds, one lasted for more than 30 minutes. A single pulse causes a beetle to land again.
The insects’ flight can also be directed. Pulses sent to the brain trigger a descent, on average by 60 centimetres. The beetles can be steered by stimulating the wing muscle on the opposite side from the direction they are required to turn, though this works only three-quarters of the time. After each manoeuvre, the beetles quickly right themselves and continue flying parallel to the ground.
The research may be more successful in revealing just how the brain, nerves and muscles of insects coordinate flight and other behaviours than at bringing six-legged cyborg spies into service, Hedrick adds. “It may end up helping biologists more than it will help DARPA.”
The problem of powering a robot, or remote control insect, has proven to be one of the larger problems in making this insectocyborg work beyond the experimental phase.
Batteries, solar cells and piezoelectrics that harvest energy from movement cannot provide enough power to run electrodes and radio transmitters for very long…
By the way, the official term for this type of cyborg-insect research is Integrative NeuroScience.
Not much word around yet on how the research for remote-controlled humans is going, but you’d presume if they can make it work in an insect, they can most likely do the same with humans. If it wasn’t illegal, in most countries to perform such experiments on humans, or deploy such assets, that is….
However, a remote-control human would be far more useful to those with sinister intent than a Manchurian Candidate. Or a remote-control beetle.
Obama Easily Survives Assassination Attempt By Killer Robot Fly.
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