Researchers Create Artificial Insect Eye

maxzilla writes "An artificial insect eye that could be used in ultra-thin cameras has been developed by scientists in the US.The dimpled eye, contains over 8,500 hexagonal lenses packed into an area the size of a pinhead. The dome-shaped structure, described in the journal Science, is similar to a bee's eye. The researchers, from the University of California, Berkeley, say the work may also shed light on how insects developed such complex, visual systems. Darpa is also funding this project with applications expected for digital cameras and high speed motion detectors."

Comments

Artificial insects: army of the future.

[master_p]

Future wars will not be faught by giant robots or ultra-enhanced bionic soldiers or UAVs. They will be faught by fleets of artificial insects with collaborative AI.

Artificial insects are capable of a wide range of operations:

1) psyops: killing the important people of the opposing force (leaders, generals, scientists, etc) would be as easy as sending an insectoid armed with deadly poison. Undetectable, it can sting its victim while the victim is sleeping, or goes to the bathroom, or is in a public place surrounded by thousands of people.

2) blocking enemy forces: a swarm of insectoids can easily render whole armies inoperable in a blink of an eye: tanks, rocket launchers, comm centers can be rendered inoperable with few insectoids injecting the proper substances at the proper places.

3) invading a land by only killing humans, living infrastructure intact.

A swarm of insectoids can go undetected by radar, since insectoids can fly in small formations, and only joined at the destination.

Nanomachines can be used to create billions of one-time insectoids at very low cost.

Been there. Done that.

[elFisico]

Seems german scientists beat those US scientists to it. The team from the Fraunhofer Institute received a german research award for creating an artificial insect eye over a year ago.

Find more technical infos here (sorry, german only).

Re:And here the troll goes again...

[Wwolmack]

Troll or no, talkorigins addresses this. Read it sometime if you disagree with evolution, and reference it if you disagree with ID.

Reshuffling requires random acts... when's the last time you conciously reshuffled your genes? Reshuffling is not evolution. Evolution ultimately teaches creation of new information, something never demonstrated by evolutionists. Besides, most reshuffling results in loss of information. For each step in the process, and whenever an evolutionist finds more detail about how something works in nature, that person should be required to calculate the probability of that particular detail evolving, and combining that with the probablility of everything else evolving, to put everything in perspective. ...Not that that would help. Your beginning premise is flawed anyhow.

From: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB102.html

Claim CB102: Mutations are random noise; they do not add information. Evolution cannot cause an increase in information.

Source:
AIG, n.d. Creation Education Center. http://www.answersingenesis.org/cec/docs/CvE_repor t.asp

Response:

1. It is hard to understand how anyone could make this claim, since anything mutations can do, mutations can undo. Some mutations add information to a genome; some subtract it. Creationists get by with this claim only by leaving the term "information" undefined, impossibly vague, or constantly shifting. By any reasonable definition, increases in information have been observed to evolve. We have observed the evolution of
   • increased genetic variety in a population (Lenski 1995; Lenski et al. 1991)
   • increased genetic material (Alves et al. 2001; Brown et al. 1998; Hughes and Friedman 2003; Lynch and Conery 2000; Ohta 2003)
   • novel genetic material (Knox et al. 1996; Park et al. 1996)
   • novel genetically-regulated abilities (Prijambada et al. 1995)

   If these do not qualify as information, then nothing about information is relevant to evolution in the first place.

2. A mechanism that is likely to be particularly common for adding information is gene duplication, in which a long stretch of DNA is copied, followed by point mutations that change one or both of the copies. Genetic sequencing has revealed several instances in which this is likely the origin of some proteins. For example:
   • Two enzymes in the histidine biosynthesis pathway that are barrel-shaped, structural and sequence evidence suggests, were formed via gene duplication and fusion of two half-barrel ancestors (Lang et al. 2000).
   • RNASE1, a gene for a pancreatic enzyme, was duplicated, and in langur monkeys one of the copies mutated into RNASE1B, which works better in the more acidic small intestine of the langur. (Zhang et al. 2002)
   • Yeast was put in a medium with very little sugar. After 450 generations, hexose transport genes had duplicated several times, and some of the duplicated versions had mutated further. (Brown et al. 1998)

   The biological literature is full of additional examples. A PubMed search (at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi) on "gene duplication" gives more than 3000 references.

3. According to Shannon-Weaver information theory, random noise maximizes information. This is not just playing word games. The random variation that mutations add to populations is the variation on which selection acts. Mutation alone will not cause adaptive evolution, but by eliminating nonadaptive variation, natural selection communicates info