Biobots

that's what you're getting at. Yes, yes, I'm saying that we should never do another episode about robots ever again. But you know, there's something else we've talked about a few times that, or at least you two have talked about a few times. I've only talked about the one time just bugs. Well, to be fair, I wasn't really talking about bugs that last time either. It was spiders. Well, the future of insects is clearly the most important type of future to talk about. But but I thought that

maybe you know, Joe. I know Joe hates robots because when I when I bring up the subject of robots near Joe, he gets this red look in his eye and he says, program to destroy. I don't know what that's all about. But anyway, I know he loves bugs, and I thought maybe we could ease you back into the robot discussion, Joe by talking about a combination of bug and robot. I think that's a great idea, and I've even got a sort of practical way to introduce

the discussion. Okay, So making robots is hard, right, Making a good mobile robot to go around and do different kinds of things, it's not easy. Sure, mechanics alone are incredibly complex, and designing a a machine that can do the sort of stuff that we do is not a trivial task. Okay, now let's make the problem even harder. Let's make that robot really small. Now you've massively compounded the problem. Yeah, yeah, because and anything that that's bulky or heavy is going to be a lot, you know,

more impossible to include. Yeah, like exactly, battery ease and solar panels, all kinds of things like that, Any kind of mechanism that creates movement, any sort of engine. Yeah, even just the computer equipment sure has wit takes up space. Okay, now let's make it even harder. Okay, let's make it smart. Let's say that it needs to make some kind of

decisions based on its environment. So it's gonna need sensors of some kind to gather data about where it is, and it's going to need a pretty robust computing system to be able to make decisions based on that data. So you're just now you're making an impossible task. Here. Wait, I'm going to make it even more impossible. Okay, let's say it's it's got to be small and smart, and it's got to carry its own energy source for a decent amount of time, you know, not something that's going

to run out of juice in ninety seconds. Okay, So now you're talking about something that you can't just power externally, like uh, you know, we we've talked about nanobots a little bit in the past. One of the common uh solutions I see to nanobots, because this is a problem when you get down to that size, how do you power something like that is the idea of using an external source like electromagnetism or ultrasonic frequencies. But you are saying even actually just have wires on them and they

try not to show them in the picture. Yeah, they really do. So you you were actually saying that this would need to be a robot that would carry with it its own ability to to you know, power itself, right, whether that be say, solar panels or a battery or whatever it is that's going to take up space and make this all really difficult. But you know what, we've already touched on it now that there's something in existence that fits pretty much all of these criteria reasonably well.

And that's an insect. It's small, it's smart. I mean, it's not that smart, but it's it's relatively for its sizee pretty it's smart in the robots since right, Yeah, compared to say a wind up toy that only will go in one direction until it knocks into something. It's smart, yeah, and it carries its own energy. You just you don't even have to plug it in. You just feed it some apple slices or some some delicious you know, bodily fluids whatever it likes to chow down on. A different

insects have different tastes. That's fair, And this is not an idea original to us. In fact, the people way up there, hidden in their scary science bunkers are going exactly down this path, aren't they. Yeah, it's it's the idea of marrying insects with robots, not literally, I mean you're actually just you're incorporating robotic elements into a an insect. You're not actually having to get married cyborg. Yeah, insect boards. So we're letting it get away from us, just like

a bug would. No, uh, this is this is entirely true. There have been many, many projects to look into how can we take advantage of the fact that the earth is covered with lots and lots of insects and if we could only bend them to our will, then we would have an incredible tool for things like search and rescue. And that was part of what inspired the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And it's just dark because people want to know what DARPA stands for. No, they don't. It's DARPA.

When I hear DARPA, I think is that an acronym um it's it's responsible for a lot of the technologies that have filtered down from the military into our daily lives, stuff that you know was originally part of the DARPA project, like like the Internet is a great example. The Internet was originally DARPA project. That's where ARPA net came from and so uh you know it's it's also responsible for some kind of scary science fictionee horror movie type of science,

including turning bugs into cyborgs. So they their program is specifically called the Hybrid Insect micro Electro McCann Nickel Systems or high MS, because I guess that's slightly better than surgery on cockroaches in it right, it's him MS, now, okay, him MS. So the goal is to create cyberna in insects. And here's a quote from the DARPAST solicitation document. This was written back in two thousand six when the project

was started. DARPAST seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects during their early stages of metamorphoses. The healing person exactly. Yeah, yeah, it continues. The healing processes from one metaphor metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable bioelectro mechanical interface to interface to insects as compared to

adhesively bonded systems to adult insects. Once these platforms are integrated, various micro systems payloads can be mounted on the platforms with the goal of controlling insect locomotion since local environment and scavenge power. So what all this is saying basically is that if you, if you put these little bits into these insects when they're still growing, it will allow us to integrate the technology more fully into them as adults than it will be to just like be like

I pasted a computer on. Yeah, exactly, though there's plenty of room for pasting computers on, as we will see later in this very poject rightly, especially if you happen to watch that fifteen minute video, What is the actual goal? What do they want these insect robot hybrids to do? Right? What was the chat? Alright? Here? Here's the also from

that solicitation. The final demonstration goal of the high MS program is the delivery of an insect within five meters of a specific target located a hundred meters away using electronic remote control and or Global positioning system GPS. Although flying insects are of great interests e g. Moths and dragonflies, hopping and swimming insects could also meet final demonstration goals. Why not crawling though? Well, I'm sure that that was

also in there just wasn't specifically mentioned. In conjunction with delivery, the insect must remain stationary, either indefinitely or until otherwise instructed. The insect cyborg must also be able to transmit data from d D relevant sensors, yielding information about the local environment. The sensors can include gas sensors, microphone video, et cetera. You can kind of get the sense based on the

language in the DARPA directive that they're thinking about surveillance. Yes, I think that seems to be the main thing in their minds is what we want to get bugs that can go out and look at what's going on over there a hundred meters away and and see what it is. Yeahah, yeah,

see what's up Now. That surveillance may be something you know, clandestine like spying, or more likely something like search and rescue, or you know, you're you're getting some reconnaissance in an area that would be dangerous to send human beings into, or that you're not sure whether it's dangerous to send

human beings into. Rather than sending out red shirts, we can send out bugs well, especially for something like like an area, consider an area that's got radioactive contamination for example. You know, bugs are much more hardy at resisting that than we humans are, So using a a bug in order to check that kind of area makes perfect sense. This makes a lot more sense than what I was thinking they would use them for, which is delivering ammunition. Yeah, when you run out of bullets on the field, a

swarm of beetles come at you with cartridges. Each one has one. They drop it into your magazine. Yeah, now that that's probably further down the road. That's that's a little it's a little ambitious for this first project. Actually, it's pretty ambitious anyway. A lot of the stuff we've talked about or that we've looked into as uh part of the the research for this podcast, UM, we're still in the relatively early stages of this kind of technology.

And meanwhile you've got other people working on different approaches. But I'll talk about that towards the end of the podcast. It's just interesting to me that now we're starting to see the fruition of some of this work. UM. And as of the recording of this podcast in early November two thousand fourteen, there have been a couple of stories that have come out about stuff like this, which is kind of interesting. I mean, it's eight years after the

initial solicitation. Well, I think we should talk about a few examples of the research in blending the insect with the robotic. Obviously, we can't talk about all the research today, there's too much, but I think we should pick a few of the cool ones and zero in on those. The first one I would like to talk about is beatles. So in this case, we're talking about the insect, not not the band beatle board fit cultural friends who are

extremely fixated upon this cultural refer. I may have watched the YouTube video with the main credit sequence of that show several times yesterday, and um, I get I wanted to arrange some harmonies where we'd each sing a partner a big bad beetle borgs. But yeah, that didn't come together. It just didn't happen. It was a cultural reference that was lost on me, to be perfectly honest. Okay, okay, let's talk about using beatles as these hybrid micro electroco

mechanical systems. The example would be flower beetles, the ones I want to look at. That's flower with the W, not with an O U. So this example is a project that was part of the HIGHMMS directive. Uh and it was a group of researchers from UC Berkeley who created a system to steer the flight path of cyborg flower beetles like Mecan Arena Torcata Hope, I said that, right,

Mecan Arena Torcata. Yeah, and uh co Tennis Texana. And so flower beetles are a group of scare of beetles, and they're thought to make good candidates for flying cyborgs because of their size and sort of the robustness, like they're thick and powerful a they're basically terrifying. Um so, so they can also carry a lot of weight exactly right, so they can you can put a bunch of equipment on them and they'll still be able to fly. Uh google these things if you want. They are not spend le,

especially in Torcado, the bigger one. They're pretty thick, pretty terrifying. Yeah. So the researchers at Berkeley built an electronic system consisting of quote, neural stimulators, muscular stimulators, a radio transceiver equipped micro controller, and micro battery. So that's the first two things. There would be the means of stimulating the parts of the Beetle to get it to do what you want. Then you've also got the transceiver that's uh to get

the command from the Beatle command center. And then you've got the micro battery, which is to power the whole thing. So that's kind of a lot of equipment to put on one insect. But did it work? Um? Yeah, it did. The Beatles could fly. So they put the system together and they mounted it on the Beatles pronotum, which if you picture like a dog or a cat, that would sort of be the back of the neck, top of

the head area they have a neck. It's not really it's just sort of like the it's the same area though. It's sort of like like the human equivalent of the name right, not not the front of the face, but

right back up right right front. Um, okay, So they mount that right back up there, and then they used remote radio signals to stimulate parts of the Beatle bodies for various aspects of flight control, including the ability to quote control flight initiation and cessation, modulate flight throttle and direction with a relatively simple interface. Um. And those quotes are from their paper in Frontiers and Integrative Neuroscience in two thousand nine. Called remote radio control of insect flight.

So their YouTube videos, I recommend looking it up and watching them because it's pretty cool. They had reasonably good success with using radio to control beatle flight patterns. That was by flight patterns. Do you mean like basically telling them to go left or right? Or how how fine tuned finally tuned were they the flights? I haven't watched.

I couldn't speak from experience. I mean, it's hard to tell how exactly what they're doing comput what the beatles doing, but it is divided into like left and right signals, and I think also making the beatle fly or getting it to stop. Yeah, we've seen a lot of videos actually that do the left or right? Is that's the essential command, right, you know, you don't have a a

go forward or stop in a lot of these. It's more that, you know, they let the bug run and then they determine which direction the bug will run right and for the flight it really does seem directional, Like I haven't seen any you know, like let's control pitch and y'alls and all those flight things that pilots know about.

And one thing we should point out is that a lot of this work isn't just to figure out how to control insects, but also to learn more about how insects fly and how they control their flight, and that there's a biological element to this. It's not just computer science or robotics or anything like that as well. Absolutely, yeah, you have to have a really good understanding of how

the system works, and luckily insects are relatively simple. But you know, flight really does put an extra kind of wrinkle into this entire endeavor, which I think is why insects like roaches have been the focus of a lot of study. Also, it's really easy to get a hold of them. There's a few running around probably at any

given time. Yeah, well, let's first give that a good hard think and then yeah, now that now that we're now that we're schemed out, it's time to really turn up the creep factor for the rest of this conversation. Let's talk about robo roaches. Okay, Well, I want to talk eventually about roach boards for search and rescue, or what I call search and roach skewe. I saw that

in the notes. I wasn't gonna but before I get to that, because that's a fairly recent development, I want to talk about robo roach, the insects cybernetics that comes straight into your home. Yeah, do you all know about this? Yeah? Yeah, there was that whole Kickstarter right, yeah, well before I think they existed before that, but the Kickstarter was was a big source of controversy, but they made their funding.

We should go back and tell the story. So there's a little education tech company called Backyard Brains with the tagline neuroscience for everyone. Yeah. There they say, their point being that not everybody has access to a university with

like an incredibly robust neuroscience laboratory. That's a good point, and that you know, people who want to learn things might want to be able to do some experimentation and uh and and kind of get you know, more involved in the field even if they don't have that direct access. And so that's that's kind of the goal. Now, a lot of that goal gets played out in uh, doing

some home surgery on bugs. Right. So this project that they initiated is called robo roach, and it's a cybernetic modification kit for cockroaches which allows users to perform surgery on a cockroach and implant electrodes into the cockroaches antennae. They use electrical pulses to stimulate the neurons in those antennae. Now, why would you want to stimulate the neurons of the antennae and a cockroach Because that's how they that's how

they steer. That's exactly right. You can control cockroach movement if you can control the nerve cells in the each antenna A right, it's not it's not precisely how they steer, but rather how they you know, they take an information from their antenna and use that to decide when to turn, because you know they'll they'll be brushing up against something and go like, oh, I'm I'm hitting a wall on my right, so I should veer a little bit more

to the left. If you were to install, say an electrode that would stimulate such a response to say there's a wall here, even if there isn't a wall there, you can make the cockroach turn right. It's like electric reins. Yeah, and it's disturbing to watch. Right. So in the robo roach kit, these electrical impulses come from a four point for Graham electronic backpack unit. They call it a backpack, and this backpack can be controlled through Bluetooth by an

app on your smartphone. Simply swipe your finger across the cockroach illustration in the desired direction, and the cockroach will turn. It'll sendol electrical charge to the right antenna or the left antenna, and it'll it'll make it say, hey, go

the other way. They're not permanently, right, No. The creators claimed that this usually only works for some number of minutes at a time, after which the cockroach sort of gets used to the false signals and ignores them, and then you have to give it a rest and and just not mess with it for a while before the roach is ready to be mind controlled all over again. Did you watch the fifteen minute instructional video of how to do this? I watched some videos. I don't think

I watched one that was fifteen minutes. I did. I'm going to give you a rundown on how this works. So I did watch some on how the surgery works. Yeah, you probably saw some of this then, Okay, So you start off by you have to sedate the cockroach by putting it into cold water, which lowers its temperature. And it's a cold blooded animal, so once it's temperature is at a certain level, you know, it's activity essentially stops. It's still alive, it's just it's it's not tickling around,

and it's hypothetically not feeling anything. Yeah, it's hypothetically not feeling anything anyway, but specifically not feeling at least not pain as we would understand it um at any rate. Then you take us some some uh sand paper, and you rub the top of the back of its head so that you can make it a little bit rough. You create like an abrasive surface so that you can apply glue. Yep, superglue. Uh, super glue, they have a specific brand. They recommend. You then attached the little circuit

board the backpack onto the superglue. Uh. Then you have to do some some crazy uh alterations of the cockroach. One of that is you have to poke a hole in its outer shell. I guess you could say, yeah, the carapace off to the little bit off to one side, so you don't hit its esophagus because obviously you don't

want to do that. Uh. And then you put the ground antenna about a millimeter in there, put some superglue onto the end of that, and then shove it in a little further so that way it holds itself tight. Then after you know, knock out the cockroach a couple more times because it's gonna wake up eventually. You didn't have to clip off the end of an antenna about down to about a quarter to an eighth of an inch, insert the electrode, like the left electrode into the left antenna,

and use some superglue so it holds inside there. Same with the right antenna. And then you have to kind of group all that together, so you get the wires out of the way and you tamp that down and then you glue that down as well, so that way it doesn't get out there and snag on stuff as the turns around. Yeah, so the uh, I just gave you a very short description of what goes on in this fifteen minute long video that I watched immediately after I had just eaten lunch and I thought, well, that

was a mistake. And and and then they demonstrate the app working and they have little roach running around on the ground and then make it turn left and right and it turns very quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it works. It looks like it must have felt like it was crashing into something. It's like, I know, over here, which is kind of I mean, it's hard to read the feelings of a cockroach. But a lot of people were very upset by this, especially when they launched that Kickstarter

campaign that I mentioned at the top of this section. Yeah, the gig starter campaign. It met its goal. It was at ten thousand and it got funded up to twelve thousand bucks, I think, but there was a lot of outcry. I personally don't know what to think about it, because, on one hand, I agree, just intuitively, it seems kind of cruel and like a mad scientist. Yeah, they had a lot of defenses, I guess I can get into

a minute. On the other hand, though, from my feelings, if I see a cockroach in my house, I'm gonna kill it. I'm gonna do everything I can to destroy this creature. It's not the kind of critter that, when you see it in your house, you think, oh, I can cohabitate with And so I wonder if the same is true of all these other people, Like if most people making the charge like this is cruel cockroaches are for stomping on and their lives quickly, don't prolong their suffering, right, Maybe, Yeah,

I'm not sure. I mean either way, Like I write, I can see both sides of that. Yeah, so they still sell the kid on their website. Of the people behind the project, I've answered some of the charges by claiming that well, I mean, for one thing, they say this is for education. It's not just for giggles, It's for a good purpose. Yeah. They also claimed that the users are instructed to perform the surgery under anesthesia. So I mean the cockroach, not the surge. I was about

to ask that seems like a runkin a doctor. Yeah, I've I've seen I've seen a little shop of horrors that didn't go well for people they have. Also, they've also claimed that the electrical stimulation doesn't translate as pain for the cockroach. It's just like a sensation, like you're supposed to go that way, just terrifying panic. Maybe they didn't. They didn't say I you would really have to say

the same thing. Yeah, I haven't had that metamorphosis. So they also say the procedure is not supposed to kill the cockroach, and at the end of the experiment they recommend clipping the electrodes off, returning the roach to a breeder colony. So can it you know it can return to being its roachy little self and not just do what the man says for the rest of its life.

Our friend Christian Sager actually interviewed one of the people behind this thing, a one Greg Gauge, I believe, and you can see a video of that interview if you google stuff of Genius backyard Brains. I think that's the easiest way to get to it, probably rather than me reading out along your or l for you to type into a computer. Um so so yeah, if if you're interested in seeing more of their perspective on why and how they created these kits, then definitely go check that out.

Did you guys also happen to see the spiker Box kit that they sell? I saw that but didn't read about. Yeah, so Spikerbox this is there's a little difference, a little bit of a tangent, but just a little bit. Um it's another way of studying neurological activity. This is a

way of studying the neurological activity of an invertebrate. They specifically use a roach as the example, and in this case they nest ties the roach, same sort of thing they put in the ice water, and then they just gently cut off one of its legs, which they then say will grow back. The leg will grow back, so it's you know, it's one of it doesn't it doesn't need to get a very specific pair of crutches so

they can make its way through its roachy existence. But then what they did was they used the leg and attached the electrodes that they had to the leg, which surprised me that it was to the leg, not to the and that the leg has neurons in it that are still active even after being taken off of the rest of the insect, and that you can even hear like it it translates that into noise that you can

listen to. You can touch the leg and the noise increases there like the leg has uh detected the touch, and that you could even get an app that connects to this kit that translates it into like a wave form, so you can see the wave form increase as stimulus uh affects this leg. And I just thought, well that's creepy too. Yeah, yeah, this this is sounding this is reminding me of our Frankenstein episode. Actually, Um, but all of this they do stress is in the interest of

promoting science, especially in children. Um. You know people who again right, don't don't have access to two giant university labs, and who might not otherwise become interested in this kind of thing without chopping the legs off of cockroaches at a young age. Right now, Joe, you were talking earlier about this search and roach skew idea. I'm curious and would like to hear more. Allow me to paint you a little picture, please do. Wait? No, well, I should

first say what the research is. So the researchers are from North Carolina State University a k a. Mad Science you as it shall forever be known now. They're led by a doctor Alper boz Kurt Or at least he's the one I've seen associated with. He's an associate professor there, and they've been working on the creation of cyborg cockroaches that can do things like be guided to stay within a digitally created fence or a fenceless boundary I think

they called it. So if they sort of like crawl around in a little area and they reach the outer boundary, it's kind of like the invisible fence for your dog, it'll cheer them back. Or they can track and recognize sounds based on high definition microphones mounted on their little cockroach bodies. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the invisible fence

one is done using a Microsoft Connect. The connect itself tracks where the bugs are, and there's a there's a border that the connect to can see, and that's considered to be the the one that the bugs can't cross, And if the bug gets towards there, then the connect automatically sends a signal either to turn left or to turn right, whichever way is most attuned to the bugs orientation at that point, and the bug turns and goes back into the middle of the circle exactly right. It's

pretty cool. Yeah, it's also it's also super super creepy to watch on video. So the creators call them biobots, but I'm just so partial to roach Board that I'm going to keep calling him roach Board, Like, you know, we are the roachboard ower your shields. We will be scuttled upon. They have not so far as I know, I've been able to link them together into a network, but when they do, that's game over focus. So but this roach board system isn't just for fun and education.

The creators imagine it could save lives in a disaster area. Such as like a collapsed building. So sution, your nearest shopping mall has collapsed after an earthquake or right, and there are people trapped under the rubble, and we need to find them and get them out as soon as possible. Well, so here's where your roach board come in. At the disaster site, you you bring in your roachboard cube and you open it up and have them stream out of it.

And this fleet of cockroaches are all wearing little cyborg backpacks, and they crawl throughout the collapse structure seeking out the sound of trapped humans. The high definition microphone capabilities allow their controllers or even the cockroaches themselves to distinguish between the sound of someone crying for help and the sound of a piece of concrete falling or any other kind

of sound. And if they start to crawl away from where the action is, the invisible fence can turn them around and point them back where they need to be. I've also heard that they could help rescue team map the environment, like identifying where the wreckage has fallen and what areas might be impassable. And you know, like sure, it would take a whole swarm of of these roach boards in order to to do this following walls the way that you would if you're like trying to run amazed,

you know. Um. And the way that would work is that they would record each little antenna bump um that they experienced through. Basically, the same technology that that controls those robo roaches just turned around on itself so that it's it's sending the signals back rather than accepting. So instead of controlling the roaches, it's it's learning from the

roaches where the barriers are, right exactly. Yeah, yeah, um, so you know, it can make it a lot safer for human rescuers, um who who eventually would go in. It would take time, but all in the name of uh safety for everyone. Sure, if you get a chance. Here's another thing to look for on YouTube. The videos of the roach experiments conducted at North Carolina State in mad signs of you it's yeah, you should check this out,

just just google it. Um. They've got roaches going through mazes, roaches being steered around, roaches inside the invisible fence, roaches responding to sound so that that may turn the correct way. But yeah, you know, if you also attached to them sensors that can detect like chemicals or radiation or something like that. Then you get into that territory of of making these really integral part of a rescue team for

something like a like a nuclear reactor accident. Absolutely. Yeah, you could imagine this being used in like the Fukushima disaster and being able to tell very quickly, Uh, if if the one if there were people that need to rescue and to how dangerous is the environment that you have to go into, and thus make the proper preparations

in order to get them out. Yeah. Right, So if you have this equipment, though, I'm wondering, if you have this equipment, like a high definition microphone or something like that, and you need them to search a large area, how do you how do you provide continuous power for that long? Well, you need some kind of onboard power source. And to help solve this problem, researchers at Case Western Reserve University have been working on a bio fuel cell that taps

into roaches natural digestive systems to create a battery. Yeah. They use a couple of enzymes to break down sugars that the roaches produced during their own digestion, which then release electrons and power a little battery. The last time I heard anything about it was twelve, at which point the battery was not powerful enough to be useful in the field without having some kind of rechargeable battery attached to the backpack kit, which would kind of nullify the

purpose of having a bio cell in the first place. Um, but it works, But the cockroach can't move anywhere. It's just to the enormous battery. But you know, but it's a pretty cool concept, and I think that they're trying to tweak it in order to get it get it to be more useful, right, Yeah, I think the NC state idea was using solar panels, wasn't it. Well, you know, that's a good question. I'm not sure if they do

use the solar panels or not. I know that the robo roach was using a just a tiny like cadmium battery, but I don't know about the NC State stuff. Yeah. Well, going back to Mad Science, you and Dr Boss Kurt uh moth bots, like, they're not just they're not just playing with cockroaches over there, they're playing with other invertebrates as well. So they have proposed a method for implanning electrodes in a moth during the pupil stage, while it's in the cocoon. So like Darka was talking about with

getting him, getting them early. Yeah, the idea of getting that the sensors get embedded into the insect very early. That gives the the tissue the chance to to heal around it. These are scientific cocoon robbers. Yeah. Well, I mean it's just if you're going to make an army of robotic moths, you gotta get them when they're young, you know, before they've really formed their ideology. It's really important.

But yeah, it's it's really it's so that you get it when the insect is still the caterpillar before it undergoes metamorphosis. Uh. And it allows for remote control of

the muscles that control flight in moths. But the end goal that particular approach would be to create a literal swarm network of biobots, similar to what we were talking about earlier with sending a swarm into a disaster area to kind of map it out, same sort of idea, but this way you would have an aerially based network of sensors to explore areas that might not be safe for humans, which is kind of cool. So like a

cloud of sensors that is mobile. Yeah, we've talked about using swarm robotics in the past before, say, for example, in exploring other planets or exploring exploring asteroids and stuff like that. It has a lot of advantages. One of them is a redundancy. Another one is that you can use algorithms to sort of average out there the different

things they experienced, the full full picture. Yeah, and uh, a lot of the information that they're looking at right now is not necessarily to have, Like it's not like the step is going to be to have this swarm network. It's more like, we're learning about the flight mechanics of moths right now, so that we can make sure that if you want a moth to turn left, you send the proper signals for the moth to turn left. Because unless until you know how that works, you can't just say,

all right, we'll just power the left wing. That's not gonna it's not gonna help get you very far now. Yeah. So the neat thing is that are actually learning about the biology and the physiology of of moths in flight. Uh, and they're trying to use that as a way to get to this end goal. And it also means that other scientists who may not be looking at the biological element of this, maybe they want to create purely mechanical robots,

can still look at the study and learn from it. Yeah. Sure, sure, because there is that question of of you know, like, maybe if we're in the end entirely skeeved out by by putting bugs to our own uses, that we could do the synthetic ones, or or even even if it's not a question being schemed out, it might just be a question of which which pathway ultimately is going to get us to where we need to be the fastest and most efficient way possible. Right. And the thing is,

right now, insects of a huge head start. Yeah, they already have hardware and software that's that's very lightweight and strong and useful, right right, So bending them to our will is certainly one of those things that might be a lot easier than having to reinvent the insect. Yeah. And we've talked about this a tiny bit before, um in our episode about bees The Future of Bees Robobs right right, that was published in May, if you if

you want to go back and listen to it. Yeah, I think we also is that the one where we talked about the delf Li micro, the tiny little uh it's extremely small drone and the battery last few minutes. I you know, we talk a lot about insects on this show when Jonathan isn't around, So I'm as special to be here today. No, no, no, that that one was was not insect at all. That was full drone. The purely there were actually but yeah, they're actually quite

remembers our episodes better than we do. Then let us know, guys some message, But now they're they're there. Definitely are big, big issues there, Like the idea of of having to power the flight definitely has its own engineering problem. Whereas if you're using a flying insect, since we already talked about it has that onboard power system already, Yeah, you've already taken care of that. As long as whatever payload the insect is carrying isn't so heavy as to prevent

it from flying, you're good to go. Okay, And I think we should acknowledge that we should save it for another podcast. The fact that, I mean, if you're not having ethical problems with insects, you might as well push it a little farther and create some cyborg mammals to do your reconnaissance for you. Borg bats, borg rats. People are working on stuff like this, and this should be a whole other creepy Times podcast. Yeah yeah, yeah, maybe, well,

let's not hog the creepy in this one. Maybe we'll out. Maybe we'll spread it out by putting some happy fuzzy episodes between now and then we'll talk about the future of cuddling. Yeah, well with rats that will one day becomes think it will be the Cuddle app. But uh, you know, that's a different that's different show entirely. I've got a piece of listener mail that I think we should get into. Let's here before we wrap it up for today. Unless y'all have anything else. That is about

all I have to say about cyborg insects. I'm ready to bug out of this one. Oh but yeah, yeah, no, we get such terrific letters from you guys sometimes, and so we are going to start a listener mail section. Yeah yeah, well, so often it's the request to do a certain kind of episode, and we've turned some of those into episodes. This wasn't that, so I just thought

i'd read it. This was from Katie on Facebook. Yeah, she says, I thought you'd be amused to know that while listening to your podcast on catching a Time Traveler, just as you began giving time travelers incentives to show up and announce themselves, my iPod went from more than charged to flat dead. I seriously had a moment where I believed that a time traveler was going to show up and announced themselves to me right then and there. It turns out this didn't happen, and I continue to

be disappointed with people of the future. Yeah, clearly the people of the future could teach Generation X a thing or two about really being slackers. Yeah, you know, and I thought I knew everything there was to know about being a slacker. You know, Katie, if you want to write us back, what I actually want to know now is which part of the incentives we were talking about when that happened, Like, was was it the part about humiliating Jonathan or the part about promising them riches in faith?

I think the humiliating Jonathan has got to be the right answer, because that's the biggest temptation of anyone I know. They seemed to take every opportunity. Don't encourage you? All right, Well, let's wrap this up. If any of you guys have some fun comments, or you have questions, or you have suggestions for future episodes, let us know. Send us an email our addresses f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter

or Google Plus. At Twitter and Google Plus, we are FW thinking. Just search FW thinking and Facebook will pop right up and leave your comment there. We read all of them, we really look forward to them, and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit Forward Thinking dot com h brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places