Monday, September 28, 2009

Buggin'

If you've been asking yourself "Gee, self... what's going on with the Fed's flying beetle program, anyway?", well, here's your answer. This is a video of the government's latest flying cyborg beetles in action. That's right, ACTUAL LIVE beetles being remotely controlled via implanted electrodes. Just wait till the government gets its hands on you!
"We demonstrated the remote control of insects in free flight via an implantable radioequipped miniature neural stimulating system," the researchers reported in their new paper for Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. " The pronotum mounted system consisted of neural stimulators, muscular stimulators, a radio transceiver-equipped microcontroller and a microbattery."
The research, supported by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is part of a broader effort, called the HI-MEMS program, which has been looking specifically at different approaches to implanting micro-mechanical systems into insects in order to control their movements.



Two words: AWWWWWHELL NO!

1 comment:

Chef Gaynol said...

Cause when I think national defense, I think where are those flying bugs they promised us? Do the bugs have lasers mounted on them? That would be cool in a creepy end of the world way.