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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. "."
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
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
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?
"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.
Good news, the Air Force is already on it (see page 35, note also this is a PDF, and pretty large))
Here's the money quote:
The civilian populace will likely accept an implanted microscopic chips that allow military members to defend vital national interests.
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.
Prior discussion was had on the vast difference between "sentience" and "sapience". These animals are sentient, they simply think differently from us and are thus not "sapient".
They are aware and capable of feeling pain, distress and at least rudimentary emotions, the impact and value of which are immeasurable in humans who can tell us what they're thinking. How fair is it to impose these things on creatures who can feel but cannot express?
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer
You keep using that word but I think it doesn't mean what you think it does...
sentient adjective able to percieve or feel things
(from The New Oxford Dictionary of English 1998)
FYI, most of our planet's lifeforms are sentient. And apes are litterally cousins to us. Turining them into remote controlled zombies is pretty much the same as doing it to a member of a remote human tribe.
Most vertabrates also have a good perception of their own body. Depriving them of it certainly would be unethical. Even if the widget would make them unaware of the fact. Not to mention that of course it has to be for some kind of defense related project...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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.