An Anthropologist Goes Techno: Cyborg cockroach

a href="http://regmedia.co.uk/2007/12/14/wii_cockroach.jpg"img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 115px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 184px" alt="" src="http://regmedia.co.uk/2007/12/14/wii_cockroach.jpg" border="0" //a divdiva href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126884.200-cyborg-cockroaches-could-power-own-electric-brains.html"strongspan style="font-family:georgia;"New Scientist/span/strong/aspan style="font-family:georgia;"strong reported/strong on the developments of insect cybernetics, namely the new and improved model of a strongcyborg cockroach/strong. /span/divbr /divblockquotepspan style="font-family:georgia;font-size:85%;""PITY future cyborg insects. As if being remotely controlled by a human isn't bad enough, their every movement may be harnessed to power the electronics that hijack their bodies. This could also extend the length of their enslavement, since the microchips had previously relied on tiny batteries with short lifespans.br /br /Engineers have been attempting to /spana href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726461.800-the-cyborg-animal-spies-hatching-in-the-lab.html"span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:85%;"gain control of insects' bodies/span/aspan style="font-family:georgia;font-size:85%;" for some time, to act as discreet spies or to take advantage of their advanced sense of smell to detect chemicals or explosives.br /br /To do this, researchers implant electrical stimulators that zap certain nerves or brain cells, triggering an impulse that makes the insect move in a desired direction. This process can be controlled by a preprogrammed chip or by remote control /spana href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726461.800-the-cyborg-animal-spies-hatching-in-the-lab.html"span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:85%;"(NewScientist, 6 March 2008, p 40)/span/aspan style="font-family:georgia;"span style="font-size:85%;"."/span /spanspan style="font-family:georgia;"a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126884.200-cyborg-cockroaches-could-power-own-electric-brains.html"Read/a the rest./span/p/blockquotepa href="http://www.botjunkie.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/spider2.jpg"span style="font-family:georgia;"img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 236px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 161px" alt="" src="http://www.botjunkie.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/spider2.jpg" border="0" //span/aspan style="font-family:georgia;"strongAdd a GPS,/strong some RFID and/or 3G technology and a video camera on the thing and multiply it to a few hundred tiny cyborgs using /spana href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds"span style="font-family:georgia;"crowd intelligence/span/aspan style="font-family:georgia;" and we'll have one efficient spy machine similar to the spider robot of ema href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/companycredits"Minority Report/a /embut half organicem. /emIf the cockroaches get strongreally/strong smart we might have one interesting YouTube channel. /span/pp /ppemspan style="font-family:georgia;"span style="font-size:78%;"strongRead also/strong /span/span/ema href="http://www.digitoday.fi/tiede-ja-teknologia/2009/01/13/kyborgitorakka-ei-tarvitse-ulkoista-virtalahdetta/2009859/66?offset=10#comments"emspan style="font-family:georgia;font-size:78%;"Digitoday/span/em/aspan style="font-family:georgia;"span style="font-size:78%;"em discussing the article (in Finnish)/em. /span/spanspan style="font-size:78%;"1st pic orig. from /spana href="http://www.foureyesjokeshop.com/" target="_blank"span style="font-size:78%;"Foureyesjokeshop.com/span/aspan style="font-size:78%;", appearing in /spana href="http://search.reghardware.co.uk/?author=James%20Sherwood"span style="font-size:78%;"James Sherwood/span/aspan style="font-size:78%;"'s article /spana href="http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/12/14/wii_attracts_cockroaches/"span style="font-size:78%;"Nintendo Wii said to 'attract cockroaches'/span/a span style="font-size:78%;"in a href="http://www.reghardware.co.uk/"Register Hardware/a news. 2nd pic from /spana href="http://www.botjunkie.com/"span style="font-size:78%;"BotJunkie/span/aspan style="font-size:78%;" (screen capture from the movie /spana href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/companycredits"span style="font-size:78%;"Minority Report/span/aspan style="font-size:78%;")./span /p/div/divdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4418089132630149325-1673096055472035976?l=techantropology.blogspot.com' alt='' //div