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This Week's Government Cyborg Animal
Security writes "The BBC writes "The Pentagon's defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions. The idea is to insert micro-systems at the pupa stage, when the insects can integrate them into their body, so they can be remotely controlled later. "."
"Pentagon defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions", what could go wrong ?
I think someone at the Pentagon has been watching too many episodes of Lost...
I think everyone involved in cutting-edge military projects should be required to read a science-contract-gone-wrong fiction book their projects. The moment I read "army of cyber-insects" I thought of Michael Crichton's book, "Prey".
I mean, when does cyborg insects become a good plan for a means of communication? They've already developed a defense for that: A can of Raid.
I read on the CBC today that some entymologists don't think this project will work due to the size of electronics. Perhaps that is the case today, but they may just get there with more advances in microelectronics.
Westblogs
Anyone catch this in the sidebar?
Dolphins trained to tear off diving gear of Vietcong divers and drag them to interrogation. Later, syringes placed on dolphin flippers to inject carbon dioxide into divers, who explode. About 40 divers thought to have been killed
Sounds like an idea that could be incorporated into Grand Theft Auto's next version.
Does this story bug anyone else? Is that my karma I smell burning?
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
01 March 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Susan Brown
IMAGINE getting inside the mind of a shark: swimming silently through the ocean, sensing faint electrical fields, homing in on the trace of a scent, and navigating through the featureless depths for hour after hour.
We may soon be able to do just that via electrical probes in the shark's brain. Engineers funded by the US military have created a neural implant designed to enable a shark's brain signals to be manipulated remotely, controlling the animal's movements, and perhaps even decoding what it is feeling.
That team is among a number of groups around the world that have gained ethical approval to develop implants that can monitor and influence the behaviour of animals, from sharks and tuna to rats and monkeys. These researchers hope such implants will improve our understanding of how the animals interact with their environment, as well as boosting research into tackling human paralysis.
More controversially, the Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails. By remotely guiding the sharks' movements, they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted. The project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), based in Arlington, Virginia, was presented at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, last week.
Neural implants consist of a series of electrodes that are embedded into the animal's brain, which can then be used to stimulate various functional areas. Biologist Jelle Atema of Boston University and his students are using them to "steer" spiny dogfish in a tank via a phantom odour. As the dogfish swims about, the researchers beam a radio signal from a laptop to an antenna attached to the fish at one end and sticking up out of the water at the other. The electrodes then stimulate either the right or left of the olfactory centre, the area of the brain dedicated to smell. The fish flicks round to the corresponding side in response to the signal, as if it has caught a whiff of an interesting smell: the stronger the signal, the more sharply it turns.
The team is not the first to attempt to control animals in this way. John Chapin of the State University of New York Health Science Center in Brooklyn has used a similar tactic to guide rats through rubble piles (New Scientist, 25 September 2004, p 21). Chapin's implant stimulates a part of the brain that is wired to their whiskers, so the rats instinctively turn toward the tickled side to see what has brushed by. Chapin rewards that response by stimulating a pleasure centre in the rats' brains. Using this reward process, he has trained the rodents to pause for 10 seconds when they smell a target chemical such as RDX, a component of plastic explosives.
The New York Police Department is considering recruiting Chapin's rats to its disaster response team, where they could be used to detect bombs or even trapped people, and Chapin met them to discuss the possibility last month.
However, Chapin's "mind patch" only works in one direction: he can stimulate movement or reward an action, but he cannot directly measure what the rat smells, which is why he has to train them to reveal what they are sensing. DARPA's shark researchers, in contrast, want to use their implant to detect and decipher the different patterns of neural activity that indicate the animal has detected an ocean current, a scent or an electrical field. The implant sports a small pincushion of wires that sink into the brain to record activity from many neurons at once. The team plans to program a microprocessor to recognise which patterns of brain activity correlate with which scents.
Atema plans to use the implants to study how sharks track chemical trails. We know that sharks have an extremely acute sense of smell, but exactly how the animals deploy that sense in the wild has so far been a matter of co
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
From TFA:
The "insect-cyborg" must also "be able to transmit data from relevant sensors, yielding information about the local environment. These sensors can include gas sensors, microphones, video, etc." (emphasis added)
Right. I'm off to flyscreen my entire yard. And stock up on Mortein. Given the current trends (at least in the U.S), carrying insect repellant could soon be considered a suspicious act...
And that kids is how I met your mother.
What's to say they can't do this to humans ?
They're always looking for new ways to controll us and keep us under their umbrella of society.
I, for one, welcome our new American overlords... (in a generation or two)
No joke there was an episode about something like that. Really weird, only I think it involved the tabacco industry....
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Think of the possibilities. Surveilance, stealthy assasination, infiltrating the most secure locations are just the beginning.
Enough of them could drug entire populations with psychotropic meds at election time. It boggles my mind.
I'm surprised they aren't trying to use them to deploy bioweapons. Lethal ones may be illegal but there are other alternatives. A bad case of the flu could turn a battle. They could be rigged to self destruct after they fed so they wouldn't spread the desease. Ironically bird flu in it's current form would be a good weapon since it doesn't spread through the air. The downside being the more people that contract it the more likely an air spread human variant would evolve. Hey no weapon is perfect.
The Ethical Implications of this plan are just sickeing. We all know it will only be a few years (decades?) before this technology is advanced enough to control every movement that an infected animal makes. Why spend billions of dollars to develope an ASIMO type stand-alone robot for physical labor when you can just jamb $200 neurocontroller into the brain of a fetal monkey and have a basicaly free slave creature? And don't even get me started on the privacy ramificiations. We need to get some international laws established to govern the abuse of tehnologys like this. Training dolphins and dogs for warefare is one thing, but forcing them to act with microchips inside thier brains is another entirely.
I mean, obviously. Look at the Predacons. They're mostly insects and arachnids and stuff (the Ant, and the 2 spiders and the scorpion). Do you want your creations to turn evil and try to destroy the world? No, if you are doing cyborg/whatever animals, you need to do mammals, like the Maximals. Of course, it might be kind of awkward if a giant robo-gorilla came over to sniff me for bombs...
A former director said in 1975: "When we fail, we fail big."
So insects were the natural choice!
*this space intentionally left blank
"One of the four pointers saying 'come and see', and I saw, and beheld a white
Yep, then mosquito bites will cause more than an itch...
They'll inflict MIND CONTROL on us! Well, at least until the mosquitos themselves figure out a way to profit from all this...
but heres just a few:
I wish i could be a fly on your wall
to voice of General Disarray : X-Files did it!!
And i for one welcome our old news disguised as new
I love humanity, it is people I hate
"Larva are spawned by Zerg Hives and carry within them the entire Zerg genetic code. At a command of the Overmind, they may pupate into an egg stage, and then transform themselves into any Zerg breed as along as the local conditions are right (there are adequate resources to nourish the pupating larva, etc.). By themselves, Larva show little intelligence and no free will..." Perfect cronyism.
"The next person who tells me that we've got a bug in the system eats and exploding cockroach."
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
So computerised military hardware mustn't have had enough bugs in it.
In other news, bee stings up 50% in certain areas of Iraq, bug spray sales skyrocket.
Now, is it just me, or does it seem that the military is taking this whole "surveillance" thing just a bit too far. Implanting bugs with microchips, cameras, microphones... I mean come on. Just put the damn things on a little R.C. helicopter and use that.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
They should focus on Raid immunity for those insects first.
There you are, staring at me again.
The taxpayers are not a part of this equation, and the DoD is so paranoid, there's not a lot of convincing that's necessary.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
*grainy, generic march music begins to play*
*A title appears: 'America on the March!'"
*The music tones down as a narrator speaks, as if from a tin can and the screen fades from black to black and white shots of marching soldiers seen from the knees down*
"America's army is on the march! Fighting a seemingly unwinable, eternal war against The Terrorist!"
*Scene shifts to a variety of different described settings, faded with the image of a stereotypical terrorist constant throught.*
"But our enemies could lurk anywhere! In your homes, your gardens, your playgrounds, buisness and even your schools! You may never know your neighbor is a terrorist until... Bam!"
*His words are accompanied by a cheese cartoon explosion and the letters 'BAM', scene opens to a nuclear family clutching each other in exgaggerated fear and surprise*
"But never fear! Our great leader, President Bush is at the helm!"
*Scene flips to shots of street riots and total chaos. An obvious mistake as the film interrupts with the message 'scene missing'*
*The narrator, obviously recorded before the film had even began to be assembled, carries on.
"And with him, some of the greatest scientific minds of our time are gathered, providing ever improving technologies to combat our invisible enemies. Here at the Pentagon, every day yeilds exciting new discoveries in the world of chemistics, internets, domestic spying, robotics, and cybornetics!"
*The film hastly flips to shots of each of these things, trying to get back on track.*
*Finally, the film settles back to normal speed and begins to move through the same shots as before the terrorised family was shown;now the dim outline of a superman-shaped soldier is present.*
"Now we have the ability to make soldiers that can be found everywhere The Terrorists can be! Gardens, playgrounds, and schools! No, we're not talking about you, Timmy."
*Stock footage is shown of a clearly disappointed 12 year old...who is looking down at his ice cream which has fallen from his cone to the sidewalk.*
"Tomorrows soldier is in countless supply! The army ant! Thanks to modern cybernetics, mother nature her self is mobilizing against the unyeilding threat posed by global terrorism! The Ants are coming, and they are on America's side; there's no other side to be on! So remember those immortal words, as America is on the March:"
*The Music begins to wrap up as the scene moves to a black and white photo of president Bush infront of an American flag.*
*The Narration yeilds to an echoy snipit of the Presidents speech.*
"If you do not stand by us, then your are with the Terrorists..."
*Scene fades to an image of the spinning earth placed on the back drop of an overhead view of the skull-like Stealth Fighter.*
*Music returns to full volume as it concludes.*
*The lights flick out as the music ends...*
Demented But Determined.
Take a really intelligent species that by all rights should be really pissed off with us and teach them how to kill us. I'll be the first to say "I told you so" if there's ever an uprising of mechanized land-walking dolphins...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
And since the World Wars, high-ups have been researching ways for their soldiers to walk through walls and kill enemies using only the power of the mind (no, not the Nazi's, the US gov, look it up).
We TRUST that the people controlling millions of lives and billions of dollars worth of gear have something of a stranglehold grip on reality. The, erm, REALITY of that, however, is a little different.
Coming this November: the Bush administration unveils cyborg voters from the Diebold Agency.
--
make install -not war
"WWII: Attach a bomb to a cat and drop it from a dive-bomber on to Nazi ships. The cat, hating water, will "wrangle" itself on to enemy ship's deck. In tests cats became unconscious in mid-air"
Then look at that smug feline in the photo next to the article. =)
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
PETA! Are you asleep? Wake up to the atrocities done against animals here!!!
Supposedly during one of the tests, someone got the bright idea to take a picture of the sleeping bats before carting them out to the test area (asleep and equipped with their little napalm canisters.) They all woke up with the flash. And, as they say, Hilarity Ensued.
We (humans) have never had good luck at this sort of thing. The Russians tried it with dogs carrying satchel charges; they trained the dogs by feeding them underneath tanks. Well, the only problem was that they used Russian tanks to train 'em, not German tanks...and apparently dogs are very good at distinguishing between Russian and German tanks.
And again, Hilarity Ensued.
Please help metamoderate.
But I'd rather they spent some of this $$$ on more body armor, maybe some post-"victory" planning.
I know. I'm out on a limb here.
Stop blowing our tax dollars on this crap and develop something useful, like an army of trained monkey butlers (with cute little hats).
This story reminds me of the book "The Watchers" by Dean Koontz. There's no cybernetic implants but instead it's genetic engineering that creates a dog that (predictably) goes heywire. Good book for anyone interested in that kind of science fiction, pacticularly if you like dogs, as there's a good counterpart to the bad dog.
Just don't go releasing the cysects during the peak mating seasons and you'll be fine.
My sharks with lasers beams will make mincemeat of your beetles with sub-machine guns!!!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
In Soviet Russia, our new insect overlords welcome you, but do they run linux?
The US Armed forces have an unfortunate history with animals doing the dirty work, at least with bats carrying incendiary bombs during WWII.
Don't forget the pigeon-guided missile, which was planned by B.F. Skinner during WWII. Wikipedia actually has a nice article on the use of military animals throughout history. The description of Project Pigeon from wikipedia:
During World War II, Project Pigeon (or Project Orcon, for "organic control") was American behaviourist B. F. Skinner's attempt to develop a pigeon-guided missile.
The control system involved a lens at the front of the missile projecting an image of the target to a screen inside, while a pigeon trained (by operant conditioning) to recognise the target pecked at it. As long as the pecks remained in the center of the screen, the missile would fly straight, but pecks off-center would cause the screen to tilt, which would then, via a connection to the missile's flight controls, cause the missile to change course. Three pigeons were to control the bomb's direction by majority rule.
Although skeptical of the idea, the National Defense Research Committee nevertheless contributed $25,000 to the research. However, Skinner's plans to use pigeons in Pelican missiles was apparently too radical for the military establishment; although he had some success with the training, he could not get his idea taken seriously.
This reminds me of a Paul Bunyan story I heard once...
SO, Paul and the guys were logging in the Wisconsin area, when all of a sudden, the entire horizon fills with dark, ominous clouds. Well, not to be pushed around by some rain or maybe a little hail, the guys keep on working. But as the cloud comes closer, they start hearing these strange buzzing sounds. Finally, they realize that it is indeed not a storm, but a huge cloud of Giant Mosquitoes!
Well, the guys haul but into the tin huts, but the giant mosquitoes start punching holes in the roof with their stingers! Paul, always being a quick thinker, grabs a hammer and starts pounding on the mosquito stingers, and they get flattened to the roof. Now, some of the mosquitoes couldn't get in or out, and the rest called it quits.
Now, Paul knew that the mosquitoes would probably be back, so he sent young Tom down the river to St. Louis to bring back some of them Guard Bees he had heard about. Tom gets back a couple of weeks later, and the bees proceed to fly patrol around the camp.
That was all fine great and dandy, until the Mosquitoes actually came back. See, the mosquitoes and the bees liked each other so much, they flew off and got married. Sure enough, their bee-squitoe kids came back a couple of weeks later with stingers on BOTH ends!
In the end, their craving for sweets caused them to swarm a fleet of ships which were bringing molasses to Paul's lumbercamp. They ate so much molasses that they could no longer fly and soon they were all drowned. Paul saved two of the mosquitoes which he later used for drilling holes in maple trees.
"We've been fighting a losing battle against the insects for fifteen years, but I never thought I'd see the final face-off in my lifetime. And I never dreamed, that it would turn out to be the bees. They've always been our friend."
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Sheesh and everyone here cheered the Darpa Grand Challenge.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
When the alien archaeologists that come to our dead world try to work our what wiped out all life on Earth, what will their judgement be?
Was it
A - A meteorite?
B - Global Warming?
C - Dick Cheney?
D - A plague of genetically and/or cybernetically altered organisms that escaped captivity (as they all do...) and ripped through the world's ecosystems destabilising eveything as they went?
Don't governments EVER learn ANYTHING? You only have to look at the crap created by the other enlightened biological experiments governments have employed such as the wanton introduction of Cane Toads into Australia.
When I was younger and flirted with the idea of a degree in genetics, I thought it would be really cool to mess about with genomes - like a Lego kit of genes to play with. Then I grew up.
There was a comment earlier about people taking ideas from Hollywood and I agree. I think that too often scientists and the military see something done in a film and think "Hey! We could do that! That'd be cool!" without thinking through the ramifications. The public at large are then mislead by the standard claim that there MAY be medical advances that may POTENTIALLY lead to the development of cures for diseases and we all say "Well that's alright then, go ahead". Things like saying that we have to embed chips in War Monkeys so that we can help stroke victims in the distant futures.
Bah! Humbug!
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
... will keep us from pumping DARPA funds into creating Spiderman.
...
But WAIT! Nobody ever said anything about arachnid-human hybrids!
I'll bet that deep in the underground bunkers beneath the White House, thousands of abducted homeless are being subjected to radioactive spiders' bites.
But it certainly seems that the ManBat is outa the running
... i wanted to say to DARPA: "thanks for the internet".
Disclaimer: Yes, I read the forwarded article (RTFA). This RTFA remark seems to often catapult the message to the top rating which is not needed in this case. My filter is set up to 5 and, yes, I already read my message.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
all shall be one with the borg... your dog food will be assimilated!!!
Articles about science (-fiction?) need to be covered by journalists that understand the meaning of various words. Take, for example, the following quote from TFA:
"Darpa believes scientists can take advantage of the evolution of insects, such as dragonflies and moths, in the pupa stage."
Methinks the author has conflated evolution with development.
This is the correct ENGLISH spelling, used in all parts of the English-speaking world, except for the USA.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Massively negative commentary from good ol' PZ.
Rats, Bats, and Vats
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Do android sheep dream of electronics?
I can see the headline now.
"Disaster strikes at Los Alamos when cybernetically enhanced insects designed for tactical germ warfare escape captivity; hundreds reported dead and critically injured."
Before I go on, I'd just like to say that DARPA has some really sick, sadistic fucks in its ranks. I don't care just how many of their inventions have made the trek from tactical to practical. Nothing DARPA has ever made was made without the idea of killing someone in mind, and these cyberslave insects are no exception.
It says in the article that wasps were one of DARPA's prime candidates for cyberization. Something about that seems odd to me, since moths would make much better bombsniffers - best sense of smell in the animal kingdom - and something like a large fly would probably make a faster and less conspicuous transmitter. Wasps and their cousins, however, know another trick - they sting, and they're pretty damn good at it. It's also possible that if wasps or hornets consume the flesh of a dead poisonous snake or chew up wood treated with certain compounds to build their nests, they can absorb some of these substances into their bodies with no ill effects to themselves. When they sting someone or something, though, all the toxins they absorbed get passed along with their own venom, with potentially grave consequences. This is one reason that if you find a dead rattlesnake on your property, you want to dispose of it safely - if the bees get a hold of it, suddenly getting stung is a very big deal even if you aren't allergic.
I'd venture to say that DARPA wanted an aggressive, resilient insect like a wasp or a hornet not because they're good fliers or because they're social, but because they sting and can sting many times without dying. They're ideal for tactical chemical and germ warfare, and a swarm of these bugs implanted with microchips and a small payload of a toxic agent or some kind of deadly germ could wipe out an entire town within minutes, or tear ass through entire platoons of soldiers in the blink of an eye. They might have come up with the idea of using these things for surveillance, security, and communications after the fact, but I can say with a fair amount of certainty that these things were designed to kill. It is DARPA, after all.
What you see as a bombsniffing bug or a discrete microtransmitter today will be an army of micro-assassins tomorrow. I'm just glad that instinct took over in the case of the wasps, for now anyway...
Ooohhh.. I can just picture the Mad Monkey Assassin modchip :)
But yes, yes, the ethics..
Defining Statistics and Social Research
They asked their spouses.
It was OK as long as they promised not to work holidays anymore. Consider the children.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
That's it. We're boned.
It's no one's fault for thinking up outlandish things - engineers should just incorporate the free-thinking meme a bit more and make these guys obsolete. That way - you'll have smart money chasing high yield ideas.
I gotta blink more while reading. At first, I thought this said:
That way - you'll have smart monkeys chasing high yield ideas.
Now that would be a better use of the test subjects. In a few million years, we're likely to get the complete works of Shakespeare!!
Right ... and as evidence you link to an Anthro course at Wesleyan University. Anthropology is one of the most left-leaning departments at every university I've ever heard about (particularly the "social anthropology" side), and Wesleyan in particular has a reputation for being extremely liberally biased itself. (Ever seen "PCU"? It was primarily based on Wesleyan.) That course is going to be about as 'fair and balanced' as the Rush Limbaugh Show.
... excuse me if I fail to take it seriously.
You might as well link directly to PETA. I'm not saying that the point is totally devoid of merit, but if those are the only people discussing it
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Humans have used animals in many aspects of life — including warfare — for thousands of years (heck, we continue eating them!). And we have often excercised immediate control of their bodies too. Pentagon is trying to replace the immediate control with remote, because the technology allows that. There is certainly nothing newly unethical about it.
Yes, because this pains the animal needlessly. But if an animal's pain can reduce or eliminate the pain of a human (think lab mice or mine-searching dogs and pigs), then it should be done. No questions about it. Oh, please, spare the grandstanding. Nobody is "disregarding ethics" — the question is, whether it is ethical or not. And it seems to me, that it is.In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
truelly can't they make an army of cyber dogs or something
...
I really hate bugs, i would even admit to be scared of them
they move weird, act weird, fly weird and they crawl in every hole they like
yuk plus all those freaky bug movies and tv series don't really stop the fear of them
You have got the mummy with the scarabs, CSI episodes, various X-files episodes,
Funny you should mention birds.
I was watching a program not that long ago about the use of carrier pigeons in World War II, as a communication method for spies. Both the Germans and the British made use of them, and at one point the British -- attempting to reduce the loss rate due to native predatory birds -- put a bounty on hawks and other birds of prey on the Southern coast of England. The Germans went the other way, and supposedly investigated using falcons to intercept and kill pigeons in occupied France. I'm not sure how much they were playing up this aspect in the show, but it was fairly interesting.
It also gave the only description of how carrier pigeons are trained that I've ever seen on TV (you train them to fly in a particular general direction by taking them gradually further from their home base in that direction, then releasing them; when they're released in a far-away and unfamiliar location, they'll "default" to going in that direction, until they recognize the land features).
The program doesn't seem to have a web site but as I recall it was a Discovery Channel production. Here's the IMDB entry for it: "War of the Birds." For anyone with even a passing interest in the history of animals in combat, it's worth watching if you ever catch it on late-night TV.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If you ever played Timesplitters 3 (future perfect), you'll know that true fun begins when you taser one of them.
They get down and boogey disco style!
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
...it happened 50 years ago.
This is very true. I've met my share of guys (and a few gals) from the Point, and they were consistently among the brightest people I've met.
However -- and this is by necessity a broad and perhaps unfair generalization -- I think the education there gears people to what I'd call the "best practices" approach to problem solving, and not necessarily a "novel solution" one. Whether that is a strength or a liability depends on the situation. But the people that I met are not what I would call hugely 'outside the box'-type thinkers, compared to say, people from MIT or other top engineering schools that I've met.
Feel free to call that a biased judgement; I was ROTC after all, and there is something of a competitve aspect between ROTCers and folks from the Point. But it would be unfair not to give them their due, and this is too often the case.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Has anyone seen Dark Angel? Doesn't this just smack of manticore starting to engineer animals, and then progressing to people?
Why stop at insects?
Actually, this may be more of a myth than anything, but there are film reels of soviets training dogs for the action.
Apparently, the Germans got wind of it before this was put into practice and Panzer crews killed anything that looked like a dog on contact. There was also the problem that the Germans used gasoline for their tanks and the Soviets used disel which produces slightly different smells so the dogs weren't that effective on own because they were trained on soviet tanks.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
In WWII, they experimented with cats: "Attach a bomb to a cat and drop it from a dive-bomber on to Nazi ships". That's good enough to be a Monty Python skit.
Although it would be one way to appropriately confuse the cat.
Who put this thing together? Me, that's who.
From the book of Revelation, chapter 9 versus 1-11
The fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the
earth. The star was given the key to the shaft of the Abyss. When he opened the Abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. The sun and sky were darkened by the smoke from the Abyss. And out of the smoke locusts came down upon the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were not given power to kill them, but only to torture them for five months. And the agony they suffered was like that of the sting of a scorpion when it strikes a man. During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.
The locusts looked like horses prepared for battle. On their heads they wore something like crowns of gold, and their faces resembled human faces. Their hair was like women's hair, and their teeth were like lions' teeth. They had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the thundering of many horses and chariots rushing into battle. They had tails and stings like scorpions, and in their tails they had power to torment people for five months. They had as king over them the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon.
what happens when birds or other insect predators eat the chip-implanted insects? would they be controllable?
It could be useful. I.E. development of interfaces between biological materials (insect eyes and the like) and electronics. I don't think the particular incarnation that they are talking about (nobody suspects the butterfly, but seriously). This direction of research could be particularly useful in the development of implants.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Can they be trained to identify Muslem scum like the president of Iran and take him out along with his ilk?
And if a wasp can control a cockroack, why not humans?
The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow.
While interesting in general, the article's startlingly glib overview of historical use of animals in war was unintentionally hilarious: "WWII: Attach a bomb to a cat and drop it from a dive-bomber on to Nazi ships. The cat, hating water, will "wrangle" itself on to enemy ship's deck. In tests cats became unconscious in mid-air" and more!
Limina.Log
You people don't need to be such fucking assholes. Just because the parent can't spell doesn't mean he's an idiot (it's often a good clue, but not always). He's also wrong about what separates us from other lifeforms. Ethics obviously ain't it, baby. We're far less ethical than many other creatures. The real difference, as I see it, is our ability to act in accord with something BESIDES our baser natures, and look to see if we're causing harm. If we say "Gee, does cutting open a pupa and shoving a computer chip in there harm the pupa? If so, maybe I won't do it." Or even saying "No, it doesn't harm the pupa much, but do we want to take another living creature and have it jumping around like a puppet, in opposition to its nature?" Only a fucking scumbag would do such a thing. Good riddance when we kill our species off, I say.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
This idea of bug tools is used by genetic engineers too. You can design mosquitoes to produce and deliver vaccines or bio weapons, whatever the mosquito is engineered to produce. But hey ... a few mutations later ... breeding gets enabled maybe ... and a new chemical is produced and delivered ...
This sounds great as long as we're not creating military human animal hybrids... ya know, like Cobra Commander. George Bush is against that stuff.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
BWAHHHAAAAAAAHHAAAAAAAAHA!
Was that the laughter of an evil-doer who has gotten a hold of this technology, or was that the laughter of Dick Cheney, who now has a new way of shooting people in the face?
Oh, wait. There's not much difference, is there?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
We had large numbers of mindless robotic drones voting in 2000. How else can you explain Gore getting so many votes? The fact that he invented the Internet only got him so far.
humans should not be allowed to even touch animals!
lets see what humanity is doing with them?
- slavery on the acre, mind controlled on the battlefield
- hunting as food and as a sport
- breeding for pets and slaughter for food
- experimentation for cosmetics and WHATNOT!
- 10 things i didnt think of
Um... from whom, exactly? I'm pretty hesitant about it, and I can't imagine most ethics committees green-lighting anything of the sort.
That's quite simple. All one needs is an UNethical ethics committee!
In the recent past, I attended "ethics training" where I worked. The presentation stressed the importance of logging an accurate number of hours for each job/task performed. It cautioned us against unethical behavior such as cooking the numbers slightly or playing with hours worked (such as working 48 hrs one week and taking a day off the next week without logging it as such).
Guess what happened at the end of this training? We went a longer than expected. So the person in charge told us to only log something like 60 minutes for training instead of the 90+ minutes that actually occured. Most of the "training" was too thin to even be labeled superficial (they were really rushing). I even sent a wry email to the Director of Ethics. He saw nothing wrong.
(The "Ethics" department would have needed to financially support the extra time taken for the training. So it was easier for them to just shove off the burden on the individual departments receiving the training. In this company, accouting is extremely important.)
While the above isn't siginificant on a quantative scale, to me it is highly significant from a qualitative standpoint. They told us to do what they just finished telling us not to do and even defended why. And they are supposed to be setting the example...