the cyborg beetle 

The cyborg beetleMan has yet to master nature, but now he can make it turn left. Armed with funding from the Pentagon's research wing, an engineering team at the University of California, Berkeley, has devised a method of remotely controlling the flight of beetles.

By attaching radio antennas and embedding electrodes in the insects' optic lobes, flight muscles and brains, professors Michel Maharbiz and Hirotaka Sato

can manipulate their subjects into taking off, hovering in midair and turning on command. The trick? Wirelessly delivering jolts to a micro battery fastened to a circuit board atop the hapless insects, whose agility and capacity to tote valuable payloads could make the tiny creatures the ultimate fly on the wall.

The Pentagon has funded a project at UC Berkley in which scientists have successfully grafted electrodes and tiny radio antennae to flying beetles--allowing researchers to steer the beetles by remote control. These cyborg beetles are both fascinating and terrifying--the project is helping scientists discover new insights into how beetles fly.

But experts are also already discussing the possibilities a remote-controlled flying beetle can offer the military. So how does one create a remote controlled cyborg beetle, anyhow? Well, evidently, electrodes are implanted at the beetles' pupal stage in order to outfit the beetles for remote control later

Using Cyborg Beetles for Good or Evil? And here's where things start to get a little unnerving--discussing how the military would be interested in taking advantage of such technology.

According to robotics professor Noel Sharkey of UK's Sheffield University,there's not too much that the Pentagon could with the beetles right now . GPS systems or other tracking devices are too heavy and cumbersome to fit on beetles' backs. But he notes that the cyborg beetles could feasibly carry chemical weapons and could be effective assassins, though this would be highly illegal.

Brain-Recording Backpacks? It's a view echoed by Reid Harrison ,an electrical engineer at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, who has designed brain-recording backpacks for insects. "I'm skeptical about their ability to do surveillance for the following reason: no one has solved the power issue.".

Batteries, solar cells and piezoelectric that harvest energy from movement cannot provide enough power to run electrodes and radio transmitters for very long, Harrison says. "Maybe we'll have some advances in those technologies in the near future, but based on what you can get off the shelf now it's not even close."

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Naveen Tanwar Amrit Singh Abhishek Kaushik Abhishek Jatrana