Backyard Brains Shows You How to Remote Control a Cockroach (Video)

This is our second video starring Backyard Brains (Motto: "Neuroscience for Everyone!"). The first one was pretty lab-oriented, with a twitching roach leg here and there. This one has more roaches, with most of them crawling on command. Will the DoD see this and decide to make cockroach soldiers? Or roboroach bomb detectors and defusers? Or cockroach drone pilots? Anything's possible these days. But meanwhile, relax and enjoy learning about roboroaches and watching how, with little circuit boards on their little backs, they scurry hither and yon under control of their human masters. WARNING: Excessively squeamish people should not watch this video, but should stick to the transcript.

Comments

Re:Cruelty to animals plain and simple

[Antipater]

Actually, the translation of that particular passage is a rather interesting affair. The Hebrew word in question, the one that the King James Version translates as "have dominion", is "radah". Radah can mean "to rule", but it's really the verb form of "the point where the roots meet the stem", or in other words, "(to be) the center of strength". It's where we get the English words "radicle", the first root of a plant, as well as "radius", "radiate", and "radical", which all have definitions that relate to a defined center point. Genesis 1:26 says that man is the center of strength of the world. If you want to interpret that as "rule", that works, but it's a focus much more on the responsibility side of ruling, rather than the power side. As a counterpoint, take a look a few verses earlier at Gen. 1:16, where he sets the sun and moon to rule the sky: "God made the two great lights, he made the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; he made the stars also." The word here translated as "to govern", "lememselet", is a much stronger declaration of rulership than "radah". Man doesn't get to lememselet the world, he gets to radah the world.