Roboroaches: Students Prepare to Control Roaches With Remote-Control Brains
Here's something a little more interesting than the same, tired frog-and-worm dissections for your high school science class: an electric backpack that you can jam into a cockroach brain to turn the bug into a kind of organic/cybernetic remote-controlled car.
That's the idea behind Roboroach, a product being developed by Backyard Brains, a company trying to find new and inexpensive ways to get practical neuroscience equipment into high school classrooms.
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By looking at what electrical impulses can do in a cockroach brain, co-founder Greg Gage hopes he can show the next generation of neuroscientists what the brain is made of before they ever get to college.
The device takes advantage of a natural instinct in cockroaches: When one of their long antennae hit a wall, they naturally turn in that direction to run along the wall. The rig triggers those same neurons via remote control, allowing students to trick the roaches into making left and right turns.
The technology is one of the simplest applications of brain stimulation -- a much more complicated example could be cochlear implants, which stimulate the brain into thinking that the ears are hearing things. The technology to steer cockroaches has existed for years, but early ideas for uses, like finding earthquake survivors in rubble with camera-equipped roaches, were limited by the amount of time the device would work. But it still makes for an impressive classroom demonstration.
It's really sad our technological / philosophical outlook has never been oriented towards Service To Other. Imagine where our planet could be now if the great majority of technological advances came through the desire to further humanity, rather than compete with, dominate, or profit from it. While I'm not necessarily sold on the human/computer hybrid that is the current direction science seems to be heading, I do like the creativity used to introduce some sophisticated and engaging demonstrations for groups of intellectually impressionable minds. With Education in decline to shambles, it's a losing battle, but I'm glad there are people who still try, and those who try well.
Here's something a little more interesting than the same, tired frog-and-worm dissections for your high school science class: an electric backpack that you can jam into a cockroach brain to turn the bug into a kind of organic/cybernetic remote-controlled car.
That's the idea behind Roboroach, a product being developed by Backyard Brains, a company trying to find new and inexpensive ways to get practical neuroscience equipment into high school classrooms.
..
By looking at what electrical impulses can do in a cockroach brain, co-founder Greg Gage hopes he can show the next generation of neuroscientists what the brain is made of before they ever get to college.
The device takes advantage of a natural instinct in cockroaches: When one of their long antennae hit a wall, they naturally turn in that direction to run along the wall. The rig triggers those same neurons via remote control, allowing students to trick the roaches into making left and right turns.
The technology is one of the simplest applications of brain stimulation -- a much more complicated example could be cochlear implants, which stimulate the brain into thinking that the ears are hearing things. The technology to steer cockroaches has existed for years, but early ideas for uses, like finding earthquake survivors in rubble with camera-equipped roaches, were limited by the amount of time the device would work. But it still makes for an impressive classroom demonstration.
It's really sad our technological / philosophical outlook has never been oriented towards Service To Other. Imagine where our planet could be now if the great majority of technological advances came through the desire to further humanity, rather than compete with, dominate, or profit from it. While I'm not necessarily sold on the human/computer hybrid that is the current direction science seems to be heading, I do like the creativity used to introduce some sophisticated and engaging demonstrations for groups of intellectually impressionable minds. With Education in decline to shambles, it's a losing battle, but I'm glad there are people who still try, and those who try well.
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