Slashdot Mirror
Rat Brains Fly Planes
An anonymous reader writes "According to The Age newspaper, scientists at the University of Florida have created neural cell cultures capable of flying an airplane using rat neurons. No actual planes are involved (yet), but the disassembled bits of rodent are already capable of level flight when hooked up to a simulator of an F-22."
Ultra-intelligent spam filters. //yay!
This is great until there is a big "Rat Flu" outbreak. Brings a new meaning to computer virus
Now people aren't even bothering to camouflage it when they troll Slashdot by taking advantage of the laughable editorial standards.
Todays date: Dec 6, 2005
Article date: Dec 6/7, 2004 (7 in the text, 6 in the URL)
So, I'm guessing we'll be seeing a few dupes of this (though I'm sure it was on Slashdot last year too, so technically it's already a dupe), followed up by someone fooling the editors into posting a blatent advertisement or an update on the number of FireFox downloads.
...in level flight. It's landing a plane that poses a bit more of a challenge.
Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons are next.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
How do you tell living neurons that he plane crashed? Has anyone some insight on this?
Yeah, I'd really like to know how they "train" these neurons to fly.
That's what intrigued me too. In fact, what seems fascinating about this research isn't so much how to get bio-neural nets to fly planes, but how one can get them to do anything at all.
This could also start a whole new branch of the debate about the ethical treatment of animals. For example, most people might accept the ethics of learning how rat brains work in order to help people with brain damage or to advance some other issue of public health or safety. But would one want to own a quasi-intelligent PDA that runs off rat neurons?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
In the original article I read last year some time, [I didn't RTFdupe] the rat brain managed to handle relatively complex things like wind shear etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Read the November article you linked to, and found this gem in the comments...
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.
I'm failing to understand why it makes any sense to make a biologically-based self-levelling system when you can accomplish the same function with fully mechanical systems. If you add computers, you don't even need humans for the majority of the flight. Why put a rat brain on a plane if good aerodynamic design will accomplish the same purpose? Any relatively modern plane (as in the last 50 years) will tend to stay level on all axes if properly trimmed.