Chinese Develop Remote Controlled Pigeons

Many readers sent us links to the story about Chinese scientists developing pigeons whose flight can be controlled remotely. The best coverage may be Wired's, both because they link to the English language version of the original Peoples Daily Online release, and because of the (disturbing) photos. The birds can be commanded to fly left, right, up, or down. Reader KDan writes, "A number of obvious uses jump out to me... the remote-controlled pigeons will finally allow us to create an efficient implementation of RFC 1149 and RFC 2549."

Comments

Re:Cool

[bjourne]

Today if you want. In fact yesterday. The only reason for this to be done in China is that in any civilised country the public will torch the lab doing this and they will be right to do so. In fact this will be one of the very few cases where I will happily side up with the animal rights people.

The exact same of research has been done in the State University of New York. See http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/05 01_020501_roborats.html/. Except the target animal was mice instead of pigeon. People were not torching that lab and they will not torch this one.

Re:Cool

[julesh]

The only reason for this to be done in China is that in any civilised country the public will torch the lab doing this and they will be right to do so. In fact this will be one of the very few cases where I will happily side up with the animal rights people.

This is presumably how come State University of New York no longer has a biology lab. Wait. I missed that news. Perhaps it didn't happen.