Pentagon creates “Cyborg Beetle” (I am not making this up)

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

I’m not making this up but I wish I were.

If you really want to see some horrifying developments in the Pentagon’s War On All That Is Decent, just google DARPA sometime and see what they’re up to.  

One of the things they’re working on is creating cyborg insects.   (Cyborg soldiers are on their plate as well).    They seem to have succeeded with a Cyborg Beetle, able to control the bug with remote-control.  

I suppose for those on whom Fox News doesn’t work, people will soon be manipulated in other, more direct ways (that’s a joke, sort of).


The creation of a cyborg insect army has just taken a step closer to reality. A research team at the University of California Berkeley recently announced that it has successfully implanted electrodes into a beetle allowing scientists to control the insect’s movements in flight. “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.

A number of research teams working on this ambitious project have reported specific successes. For example, researchers at the University of Michigan have demonstrated implants in a flying moth, but the Berkeley scientists appear to have demonstrated an impressive degree of control over their insect’s flight; they report being able to use an implant for neural stimulation of the beetle’s brain to start, stop, and control the insect in flight. They could even command turns by stimulating the basalar muscles.

Eventually, the mind-controlled insects could be used to “serve as couriers to locations not easily accessible to humans or terrestrial robots,” they note.

Just another lovely development in the War On terror drugs humanity.

For more nightmare-inducing DARPA projects, just click here:

http://gizmodo.com/tag/darpa/

Keep in mind, this is the stuff they LET us know about.

19 comments

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    • Inky99 on September 28, 2009 at 20:15
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    Maybe this will give you a jolt.

    • TMC on September 29, 2009 at 00:20

    “terrestrial robots” 😉

  1. Actually UC Berkeley had been working on the bionic bettle for flying into hard to access areas. For example, it would be useful for fire-fighters to actually able to visualize integrity of the internal structure under distress via a camera mounted on the beetle or on a miniature radio controlled aircraft/rotorcraft before attempting any rescue effort.

     

    • Joy B. on September 29, 2009 at 03:42

    The moment they build a cyborg palmetto bug I’m moving to Mars!

    • Miep on September 29, 2009 at 04:44

    anything IMPORTANT or CRITICAL that needs immediate attention in this country, y’know.

    Why not play with bugs? Why not cut wings off flies, while we’re at it?

    Boys will be boys.

    • on September 29, 2009 at 09:45

    [beetles], and I did not speak out-because I was not a [beetle] . . .

    Then they came for me-and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

    Pastor Martin Niemöller

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F

    It gives me the serious creeps to think the Pentagon is controlling any organic brain via remote control.  

    Thanks for letting us know about this, despite the ensuing nightmares I can expect.

    • Robyn on September 29, 2009 at 22:56

    …that comes out of DARPA is bad?  Does that include the Internet?

  2. So they’ve taken the same technology that makes Glenn Beck listeners behave as they do and implanted it in an otherwise harmless insect. Forward, reverse, left, right, act really crazy!

     Borg Beetles … I’ll be seeing them in my dreams.

    • C Barr on September 30, 2009 at 15:55

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