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Cyborg cicadas play Pachelbel's Canon
- k310 1y agoAw, get a tiny piezo speaker instead. We don't use frog's legs as activators any more, since Galvani.
- mystraline 1y agoYuck. Torturing insects to make worse-than-MIDI music is gross. Like, I dunno, record lots of cicada sounds and SIMULATE it? These researchers should be ashamed of themselves. And it wasn't other-life-saving reasons, but shitty music.
- debugnik 1y agoThey do claim to have a better motive, but it's a fairly weak one: > with the idea that cyborg cicadas might one day be used to transmit warning messages during emergencies
- msla 1y agoI've lived somewhere with cicadas. If their drone begins to tell me things, I'm checking into a mental hospital for a schizophrenia workup and/or so the massive bug monster doesn't eat me.
- dheera 1y agoAcademic "motivations" are just there to get papers accepted. Papers are just there to get tenure and graduate. Most of academia isn't after real science anymore.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoOh like in "When They Cry"
- cyberax 1y ago> to transmit warning messages during emergencies In other words, if you see insects with electrodes that are moving towards you: RUN!
- bitwize 1y agoHorrors beyond human comprehension, got it. We know that arthropods can meaningfully feel pain. Turning living insects into a biological Floppotron is some Dr. Moreau shit that will earn you, at best, an IgNobel -- and I'm not even sure the IgNobel committee would want to draw positive attention to this kind of work. That said, I'm sure that The Fifth Element style spy cockroaches will start appearing in homes and offices courtesy your local intelligence agency before the decade is out.
- smt88 1y ago> We know that arthropods can meaningfully feel pain We don't know that. They're capable of detecting and avoiding harmful stimuli, but that doesn't mean they have the subjective experience of pain. This research also seems quite tame compared to the trillions or quadrillions of insects we torture to death using pesticides when growing our food or protecting our homes.
- hydrogen7800 1y ago>They're capable of detecting and avoiding harmful stimuli, but that doesn't mean they have the subjective experience of pain. This reminds me of "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace. I remember being pretty convinced by his argument that lobsters do indeed feel pain when boiled alive, which was interesting because, as I recall, he argued with simple logic rather than using any biological basis. It may have been as simple as avoiding harm = experiencing pain. I suppose this does not necessarily follow. I'll have to read it again some time.
- airstrike 1y agoThe bigger tragedy here is choosing Pachelbel's Canon.
- inetknght 1y agoWhat would you have chosen instead?
- airstrike 1y agoRage Against The Machine - Killing In the Name
- krelas 1y agoNow you chirp when they shock you
- foobarbecue 1y agostuck you I won't chirp when they shock me!
- downboots 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jmnAA_foUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jmnAA_foUI
- nvader 1y agoDirect YouTube link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49K0L2fSig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49K0L2fSig
- nvader 1y agoAnother thought: it seems to me not out of the ordinary that with access to our own brains, someone could literally "play them like a fiddle". This suggests that we should start to enact laws that decision making politicians should be required to be air-gapped.
- jagged-chisel 1y agoAnd because anyone can run and become elected to office, perhaps we should all just be air-gapped.
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- viraptor 1y agoThe closer we get to that, the more we can watch Ghost in the Shell as a prophecy of things to come.
- poly2it 1y agoMany seem worried about the safety of the insects. An author responded as mentioned in the article. > The experiments did not harm the cicadas, co-author Naoto Nishida, now at the University of Tokyo, told New Scientist. "Some of them wanted to run away," he said. "Others were like, 'OK, use my abdomen.'"
- bqmjjx0kac 1y agoI don't think arthropods are capable of informed consent, despite what the author claims.
- poly2it 1y agoI'm new to HN, and if you're downvoting this, I'd like to know how to better contribute to the discussion.
- raldi 1y agoI don't understand the "emergency warning" use case.
- InfiniteLoup 1y agoThis could simply be an alibi to obtain funding or appease an ethics committee (if there is one involved). It's become a meme to label research as a "search and rescue" application to justify working on armed cyberdogs with wall-penetrating radar.
- rozab 1y agoIt's just xkcd 2128, it's something shameless researchers apparently feel obligated to say no matter how ridiculous it is https://xkcd.com/2128 https://xkcd.com/2128
- croemer 1y ago> The experiments did not harm the cicadas, co-author Naoto Nishida, now at the University of Tokyo, told New Scientist. "Some of them wanted to run away," he said. "Others were like, 'OK, use my abdomen.'" This is hard to believe. They stabbed them with electrodes, surely that does some harm.