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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.
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.
May I be the first to ask: but do they have frickin' laser beams?!
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.
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?
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.
Well, that would help explain the the past two presidential elections.
"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.
So computerised military hardware mustn't have had enough bugs in it.
*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.
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.
Stop blowing our tax dollars on this crap and develop something useful, like an army of trained monkey butlers (with cute little hats).
For those of you who dislike messing with PDFs, here's the google cache in HTML Format
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.
Well, they already had RC roaches back in 2001: 1, 2.
The equipment on both of those looks off-the-shelf and testing-mode rather than optimised for size. Granted, those are big roaches, but you can betcha that 5 years on things have got a lot smaller; and if it goes towards use, then it'll be better funded and use smaller components.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
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.
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.