The Prairie Pooch Hole
Before reading this article, Soup Hound - yours truly, has some news for you: your mother is a cyborg, and your dog was recruited by the CIA. We know all about you!Oh! Almost forgot. I can stop a speeding bull with the flick of a switch. And, if you don't read this article, I can just as easily command said bull to attack YOU!
Maggot!!
THE next time a moth alights on your window sill, watch what you say. Sure, it may look like an innocent visitor, irresistibly drawn to the light in your room, but it could actually be a spy - one of a new generation of cyborg insects with implants wired into their nerves to allow remote control of their movement. Be warned, flesh-and-blood bugs may soon live up to their name.
It's not just insects that could be used as snoops. Researchers have already developed remote control systems for rats, pigeons and even sharks. The motivation is simple: why labour for years to build robots that imitate the ways animals move when you can just plug into living creatures and hijack systems already optimised by millions of years of evolution? "There's a long history of trying to develop micro-robots that could be sent out as autonomous devices, but I think many engineers have realised that they can't improve on Mother Nature," says insect neurobiologist John Hildebrand at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Furthermore, animals' sensory abilities far outstrip the vast majority of artificial sensors. Sharks, moths and rats, for example, have amazing olfactory systems that allow them to detect the faintest traces of chemicals. And if you can hide your control system within your cyborg's body, it would be virtually indistinguishable from its unadulterated kin - the perfect spy.
José Delgado at Yale University created the first cyborg animal in the 1950s. Delgado discovered where to insert electrodes in the brains of several species, including bulls, to acquire crude control of their movement. In one dramatic demonstration in 1963, he stood in a bullring in Córdoba, Spain, as one of his cyborg bulls charged at him. With just seconds between him and a good goring, Delgado flicked a switch and the bull skidded to a halt.
The cyborg concept drifted back into science fiction for a few decades, until 2002 when a team announced that they had developed a cyborg rat whose movement could be controlled remotely (New Scientist, 4 May 2002, p 6). The team led by John Chapin at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Brooklyn, implanted electrodes in the rat's brain which apparently mimicked the sensation that its left or right whiskers had been brushed. They then trained the rat to respond to the electrical stimuli. For example, if the rat turned right when the brain region associated with its right whiskers was pulsed, then reward centres in its brain were electrically stimulated.
Linda Hermer-Vasquez at the University of Florida in Gainesville later joined the project to train the cyborg rat to identify specific scents, such as humans or explosives, to demonstrate that it could be used in search-and-rescue missions to find people trapped under rubble, for example, or to sniff out bombs.
To give the animal's operator a rat's-eye view, the most advanced generation of cyborg rats were kitted out with video-camera backpacks. These souped-up rats were trained to board a rolling carrier so that they could be easily transported to the site of their mission.
To test the system, the team allowed a rat to descend from the carrier and remotely steered it to the area they wanted searched for traces of an explosive. Once in the correct area, they switched off their remote control. "When the rat realised that it was no longer being controlled, it went into odour-sniffing mode," says Hermer-Vasquez. Within a few minutes, the rat had successfully identified the source of the scent. They repeated the test several times, with the same result.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726461.800-the-cyborg-animal-spies-hatching-in-the-lab.html
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