
Cockroaches made to follow directions via wireless nerve stimulation - lelf
http://phys.org/news/2015-03-cockroaches-wireless-nerve.html
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pavel_lishin
Bah, the connection from researchers' computers to the cockroaches' control
chips was wireless - I thought this was about stimulating the cockroaches
nervous systems without the need for a physical wire. :/

Disappointing headline.

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luciferwasright
But then you wouldn't have clicked the link, would you? ;)

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pavel_lishin
That's pretty much the basis of my complaint, yes.

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moe
How is that news?

This kind of stuff has been done since the 70s or even earlier.

You can buy commercial cockroach control kits, including iOS and Android Apps
for remote control;
[https://backyardbrains.com/products/roboroach](https://backyardbrains.com/products/roboroach)

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MechSkep
So there was a DARPA initiative to do stuff like this back in the 90's/early
2000's:

[http://archive.darpa.mil/darpatech99/Presentations/dsopdf/ds...](http://archive.darpa.mil/darpatech99/Presentations/dsopdf/dsorudolph.pdf)

Turns out it's easy in controlled environments, and doesn't work at all
outside. Once the animal sees something it wants to eat/mate with, it's just
going to leave.

The claimed contribution of this work is direct ganglial stimulation as
opposed to the antennal stimulation which was used previously. But I'm not
seeing anything new in terms of capability/new science, and their data
collection methods seem hinky:

 _The controllability of a roach, in terms of success rate, was subjectively
rated based on user observation. If the user was able to successfully have the
cockroach turn in a desired direction, then a run was deemed successful._

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ortusdux
Is there any indication that the roaches are having their motor control
stimuli hijacked instead of simply being electrocuted and attempting to steer
away from the source of the pain?

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zachalexander
There aren't pain receptors in the brain, so stimulation like this is unlikely
to be painful.

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ortusdux
Either the bot in charge of grabbing the abstract messed up, or they are
playing god with cockroaches: "We find evidence that broad supernatural
punishment drives political complexity, whereas MHGs(moralizing high gods)
follow political complexity. "

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eeZi
Wrong abstract.

[http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/12/105/201413...](http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/12/105/20141363)

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html5web
Very dangerous experiment!

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pavel_lishin
How so?

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ortusdux
Third paragraph down:

"Such studies straddle ethical boundaries, some have noted, if humans create
cyborgs to crawl into misbehaving nuclear reactors or skittle around in debris
looking for survivors after earthquakes, for them, does that cross a moral
line? What if the technology moves to dogs, cats or even monkeys?"

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dogma1138
I would be more afraid of the day they put those things on humans.

Oh this implant can be used to reduce violent behaviour of humans lets put it
into prisoners.

Oh this python script exploits a zero day vulnerability in the implant making
the prisoners go ham.

msf> use exploit/generic/implants/human/prisoner_implant_hijacker...

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lectrick
All hail your new human overlords.

