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

Whats the application? What about ethics?

[Qbertino]

Must we do everything that we can do? I scares me a little seeing a lack of ethical concerns here on subjects like these. The chinese didn't develop these pigeons. Nature and evolution did. The chinese opened their heads and stuck wires into them. NO big deal and nothing really scientific.
This sort of 'research' goes to show that some areas of modern science are even more bogus, bizare and pointless than some obscure spiritistic variants of alchemy from the old days. If I'd be in charge these scientists would lose their funding, their job and their accreditation all at once.
Unethical bullshit pseudoscience not very far from what the Nazi KZ Doctors did to the people captured in the camps, that's what this is.

I wouldn't be surprised....

[sycodon]

If they have been experimenting on human prisoners with this. The Chinese government has been very successful in hiding or white washing their atrocities. Some day we will find that Hitler had nothing on the modern day Chinese government.