[HN Gopher] Cyborg cockroach could be the future of earthquake s...
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Cyborg cockroach could be the future of earthquake search and
rescue
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 47 points
Date : 2023-12-08 12:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| fnord77 wrote:
| After I got over my initial horror, this is pretty interesting.
|
| I wonder if fish could be rigged up like this, too.
| civilitty wrote:
| Yes but scientists have only recently managed to use implants
| to study navigation in fish [1], so we don't know how to
| control them. Fish brains are significantly more complex than
| cockroaches so it might not be feasible.
|
| [1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/cyborg-fish-solves-
| brain-s...
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| We control humans pretty easily through social media. Perhaps
| a social media for fish. We could call it "School" (trademark
| pending)
| cs702 wrote:
| Eww.
| datameta wrote:
| Agreed. But I suppose to save more lives, it is worth it?
| cs702 wrote:
| Yes. 100%.
|
| I'm utterly disgusted by it, and also thankful for it.
|
| These feelings are orthogonal to each other.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| I suggest staying away from earthquake areas. You might
| survive the earthquake only to be "rescued" by one of these
| guys.
| datameta wrote:
| Too late, I'm ending a week in CDMX. The earthquake
| oriented infrastructure is interesting. Long external
| horizontal struts are used on buildings that are
| irregular polygons. Often external (or "internal" but
| outside) staircases are reinforced and joined to the rest
| of the building. The skycraper architecture starting in
| the mid-1950s was a proving ground for architectural
| techniques that were studied internationally, including
| by Japan.
| j4yav wrote:
| Maybe it's just me but wiring electronics into the brains of
| animals to remote control them seems morally wrong, even if it's
| "for a good cause."
| ceejayoz wrote:
| A cockroach seems about as sentient as ChatGPT is.
| dilawar wrote:
| I doubt it. At minimum, chatgpt needs to run away from
| painful stimuli (given a choice).
| ceejayoz wrote:
| ChatGPT avoids uncomfortable conversations just fine. Both
| it and the cockroach are doing what their programming says.
| Erratic6576 wrote:
| Just like humans are. Our programming tells us to eat,
| socialise, reproduce, sleep, etc. and it compels us to
| obey our programming in more subtle or explicit ways.
|
| Just because we pretend to be more complicated does not
| make us any better than cockroaches. From an ethical
| perspective, roaches are superior to human beings because
| they have never created factories and chemicals to set
| other living roaches alive, nor do they plan to remove
| their kin from a particular territory by bombing baby
| roaches to death by the thousands.
| abraae wrote:
| Agree, though I guess it's only one step further on from
| fattening them up on chemically enhanced food before killing
| them and eating them. Which I put up with in order to eat my
| share of meat.
| jWhick wrote:
| how is this any different or beneficial compared to having a
| small robot doing the same task?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| A few billion years of evolution behind the machinery.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| cockroach is probably easier to grow.
| traveler1 wrote:
| wondering this as well - the article suggests that it would be
| able to run for longer thanks to the vision/sensory systems
| being driven by a very low wattage system, requiring a much
| smaller battery... but I'm not convinced that a slightly larger
| system, perhaps with wheels or the ability to jump, would be
| outpaced by this particular "biohybrid"
| datameta wrote:
| Longer active time in the field due to only needing battery for
| control and sensing, while using the built-in nervous system
| and locomotion.
| giardini wrote:
| And would be very useful in war.
| 01acheru wrote:
| I had to close the article after seeing the hand holding the
| cockroach, I'm still disgusted after a couple of minutes.
|
| If you have the same disgust don't open the article or open it
| with images disabled.
|
| BTW TIL it is called katsaridaphobia.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| As a veteran-ish roboticist, I'm real tired of the bag of tired
| justifications used for robotics research in extreme
| environments.
|
| On the other hand, as a veteran-ish roboticist, I'm quite
| convinced that future folks of my kind will be more biologist
| than programmer. The plethora of self healing and self optimizing
| biological systems available for hijacking is really astounding.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| I always assumed "search and rescue" was an euphemism for
| military research
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Apologies for lowering the level quality of the comments.. but..
| _PICKLE RIIIIIIIIICK!!!_ (I mean the whole episode, with mice,
| roaches, etc.)(and excuse the caps, the actor keeps shouting it
| in the episode)
| Onavo wrote:
| They stop working after a while, the way it works is by
| stimulating their antennas and the roach's nervous system will
| learn to ignore it went there are no rewards to reinforce the
| process. It's a biological version of Mousey the robot.
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| My understanding is that it's not interfacing with the insect's
| brain directly but is instead using electrodes to stimulate
| receptors that trick the insect into thinking it has felt
| something on its left/right side and moving accordingly.
|
| Other approaches include inserting electrodes into muscular
| tissue and stimulating that to cause the muscle to move. This
| article also describes inserting the electrodes into moth pupae
| and the moth growing around the electrodes:
|
| https://robot-watch-impress-co-jp.translate.goog/cda/news/20...
| failTide wrote:
| I've been reading about this roach backpack for ~25 years - is
| this approach (connecting to antennae) a dead end?
|
| A version is commercially available as a type of learning toy.
| https://backyardbrains.com/products/roboroachBackpack
| blindriver wrote:
| I came in to say this exact same thing. I've heard this story
| so many times over my lifetime, the idea that this is the
| "future" feels like Tesla's Full Self Driving Robotaxi fleet,
| just a few years away every year!
| civilitty wrote:
| It's not a dead end per se because cockroaches are used as a
| model organism in neuroscience experiments. They're just not
| very useful outside of academic research for the same reason
| that they're useful in the lab: their brains are _very_ simple.
|
| I think this application would only work if they were released
| as a swarm, using basic triangulation of the mesh network to
| get them to spread out throughout the rubble, exploiting their
| natural ability to crawl all over the place in great numbers.
| jahewson wrote:
| Cockroach stories are very resilient and can survive almost
| anything.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| To be coldly analytical about this: how many people discovered in
| rubble are successfully rescued? It makes for good TV, but
| finding those people, orchestrating the movement of debris, while
| person is potentially injured, all given the context of a wide-
| spread disaster seems low odds.
|
| When the Surfside condominium collapsed in Miami (a very
| localized calamity), did rescuers have a genuine belief that
| anyone trapped underneath could still be alive and saved? From my
| armchair, it seemed foregone conclusion that there were going to
| be no survivors.
|
| Seems much better to have a contingent of drones which can
| quickly canvas an area and locate survivors visibly trapped or
| otherwise requiring assistance on the surface.
|
| Edit: Wiki page on the Surfside:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse
| Apparently four people were extracted, and three of them survived
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Four people were recovered from the rubble alive (one later
| died) in Surfside, so that wasn't the conclusion at all.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse
| julianeon wrote:
| To be coldly analytical in response: Surfside is a bad example.
| You're right that it wouldn't matter there, but that's not the
| use case.
|
| On the national level, because there are few dire incidents in
| an affluent peaceful nation, there may not be much use for this
| in, say, the USA. You can solve most of its emergency problems
| with raw manpower and there aren't many resource constraints.
|
| It's real use case is international, especially in times and
| places of war.
|
| I can pick two out of the news right now - Ukraine, Palestine -
| and say it would be helpful there. But even if those wars
| ended, we can be certain new ones will crop up with similar
| conditions, where it could also be used. There will always be
| places, internationally, where buildings are collapsing and
| resources for rescue are scant to nonexistent.
| westurner wrote:
| What about aerial infrared for (news,) helicopters and
| quadcopters?
|
| How to cost that over for disaster relief
|
| https://universemagazine.com/en/how-nasa-helps-find-people-t... :
|
| > _Scientists affiliated with NASA developed a device called
| FINDER (Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response)
| ten years ago, which can accomplish this task rapidly. FINDER is
| a microwave radar capable of sensing the smallest movements
| through the debris._
|
| https://spinoff.nasa.gov/FINDER-Finds-Its-Way-into-Rescuers-...
|
| Also, "Phonon Signatures in Photon Correlations" (2023)
| https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13...
| chasd00 wrote:
| I saw this in popular mechanics 30 years ago I swear to god. The
| movie The Fifth Element even parodies this with a "spy
| cockroach".
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(page generated 2023-12-09 23:01 UTC)