A wireless network allows electronically enhanced bugs to chirp, tweet, and blog (some day!) about weapons they find

Wi-Fi Fly via MI2G

In its attempts to quash weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon has been trying novel ways to track down dangerous materiel. For years, DARPA has been trying to train insects and bugs to sniff out toxic substances, providing more sensitive detection, as well as access that conventional sensors might not have. The newest twist on this concept is a plan to link up armies of the cyborg bugs in a peer-to-peer, or insect-to-insect, network that will allow them to communicate with each other and with their human masters.

Previous research into this field of detection included landmine-sniffing honeybees and mechanized remote-controlled insects. This next approach will implant insects with a chip that reads certain muscle twitches, which correspond to the presence of certain chemicals. The chips will then modify the chirps of insects like cicadas or crickets into an electronic signal that could be transmitted to other chipped insects in the area. Information about detected weaponized chemicals could bounce around this mobile insect network, and then be picked up by humans.

While the idea seems pretty far-fetched, the idea of creating a decentralized communication network between free-roaming insects could radically increase the bugs' range of detection. Still unclear, however, is if this insect Wi-Fi will allow the information-laden chirps to be more than 140 characters long.

[via Wired]

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8 Comments

I remember another insect/soldier plan by an MIT professor back during the Vietnam war. He wanted to train insects to latch onto Vietcong soldiers using the Ho Chi Min Trail. The bugs would bite and annoy the Vietcong guys so much they would surrender and we would win the war.

Clever plan. I don't think the insects cooperated though.

newyorkdude
celluloseethanol.info

The army tried this once already and failed, it failed because the cammera on the "bug" was to heavy and was to hard to steer. If they try it again they'll fail most probably. they'll end up wasting theyre life on this project then regretng it at the end.

but the good thing is if this works it'll be less dangerous to spy on people with a bug. theyll never notice.

I read a book on fabricated insects created to do tasks. It did not turn out well, they started killing people.

with that disguise that "fly" wont live very long

cool it is very belivable and my dad works at the pentagon

Here is the real artical:

http://www.nationalterroralert.com/updates/2009/07/15/cybug-military-developing-half-robot-half-insect-spies/

hell of this takes off itll pobalbly be eadsy for the enemy to copture such insects costing us prehaps millions

on the other hand if this does work the next step would be to create mecanized insect wariors

What about holograms of quantum-plasma energies, there combined into those so-called rods. Scientists at CERN are using one part of that clue, and don't know it. Anyway, one accomplished tiny dragonfly (mission unknown) was witnessed, about 6 years ago, from unknown technology. Among the mentioned reasons for use of this small sensitive engineering -and most likely main one- is to invade on privacy.



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