Thankfully (or maybe not?) that we don’t have insect rights activist yet. If not, those researchers over at Washington University in St. Louis wouldn’t be able to carry the research of bomb sniffing cyborg locusts.
Yeah. You heard that right. It is not only beetles and dragonflies that are going under cyborg treatment, locusts too. I wonder if the insect kingdom will react in horror about how this is playing out for them.
According to a study, researchers have discovered that locusts are able to distinguished between the scents of TNT and other explosives.
Apparently, locusts are not capable of picking scents of explosives, but also discriminate between different explosives’ smells and they can do so in under a second.
The U.S. Office of Naval Research-funded research aims to explore how locusts – cyborg locusts to be specific – can be used to sniff out bombs.
While the research, which is being carried by a team over at Washington University in St. Louis, has some progress, there is still much to do. Scientists will have figured how to direct the locust where needs to be sniff out.
That brings us to a separate research by the university where a team has demonstrated the ability to control the locusts as well as “reading their brains,” and thus discerning what it is they are smelling.
And yes, locusts can smell and differentiate explosives according to a research published on Biosensors and Bioelectronics: X. We shan’t dive into details (because, they are just way too mind-blowing for us to digest properly). But if you are interested in learning more on this groundbreaking development, you can watch the video below, and pore through the publications HERE and HERE.
Images: YouTube (Washington University in St. Louis).
Source: boing boing.
