Bio-Art: Roachbots.

I'm going to let the video do the introducing this time:



Now, WTF was that? A company called "Backyard Brains" has released a series of kits related to neurology and cockroaches. Some of them just feature moving cockroach legs with a few wires. The more impressive kits allow one to brainwash cockroaches. No, you do not need a degree of any kind to do this; that's the whole point.

As the site itself puts it, "Backyard Brains enables anyone to be a neuroscientist."  The site has a series of experiments, all of which can be dome with their kits and a few things found in most households. Another famous invention of theirs is the "SpikerBox," which amplifies the sound of neurons to an audible level. It's all pretty cool, and a lot of it will be fuel for future entries.

The "RoboRoach" involves stimulating the antenna nerves of cockroaches so that one can have a brainwashed roach puppet for a few minutes. The whole thing is done via a "backpack" that fills the antennae with fine wire, which in turn tells the cockroach where to move via nerve pulses. You can only tell it to do things like move left and right, but that's still pretty nifty. Same basic idea as RatBot, only less precise and using an icky roach instead of a cute rat.

It's not that this idea has not been touched on before. There was an old cartoon involving robot roaches. One also appeared on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but do note that these RoboRoaches will not become the roachinator above.  Roachbot is not a real cockroach; it still works just as good as RoboRoach for freaking out your friends. Have fun messing with household pests!

Newsflash: Human Brain Cells Grown in Lab Mice.

"They're Pinky and the Brain 
Yes, Pinky and the Brain
One is a genius, 
the other's insane.
They're laboratory mice,
Their genes have been spliced,
They're Pinky, they're Pinky and the Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain..." 

For those of you not aware of the above ditty, it comes from a segment on an old (but very good) cartoon called Animaniacs. Listen to it here. The "Pinky and the Brain" shorts involved two lab mice who had been enhanced into super-intelligent, talking rodents, one of whom was hell-bent on taking over the world using various wacky means.  Now that we're putting human brain cells in rodents, there is a very good chance that mice, becoming ever more like humans, may well start taking over the world.

"May 3, 2013 — A key type of human brain cell developed in the laboratory grows seamlessly when transplanted into the brains of mice, UC San Francisco researchers have discovered, raising hope that these cells might one day be used to treat people with Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, and possibly even Alzheimer's disease, as well as and complications of spinal cord injury such as chronic pain and spasticity. 

"We think this one type of cell may be useful in treating several types of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders in a targeted way," said Arnold Kriegstein, MD, PhD, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF and co-lead author on the paper.

The researchers generated and transplanted a type of human nerve-cell progenitor called the medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) cell, in experiments described in the May 2 edition of Cell Stem Cell. Development of these human MGE cells within the mouse brain mimics what occurs in human development, they said.

...

To generate MGE cells in the lab, the researchers reliably directed the differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells -- either human embryonic stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells derived from human skin. These two kinds of stem cells have virtually unlimited potential to become any human cell type. When transplanted into a strain of mice that does not reject human tissue, the human MGE-like cells survived within the rodent forebrain, integrated into the brain by forming connections with rodent nerve cells, and matured into specialized subtypes of interneurons.

...

"The hope is that we can deliver these cells to various places within the nervous system that have been overactive and that they will functionally integrate and provide regulated inhibition," Nicholas said.

One mystery and challenge to both the clinical and pre-clinical study of human MGE cells is that they develop at a slower, human pace, reflecting an "intrinsic clock." In fast-developing mice, the human MGE-like cells still took seven to nine months to form interneuron subtypes that normally are present near birth.

"If we could accelerate the clock in human cells, then that would be very encouraging for various applications," Kriegstein said." - Source with more.

Of course, the scientists are doing this to cure neurological disorders, That includes everything from autism to back issues. The result might still be mice with the intellects of human children, if the internal clock is to be believed.

That said, Pinky's more realistic.

Mind, this isn't quite gene splicing. It's a tissue implant of human cells into a rodent body. We really don't know what will happen with this; the neurotransplant technique is only a couple of years old. Give it time; they'll try to take over the world eventually. If the enhanced mice start talking and one of them starts saying "narf," we'll know for sure that these scientists have seen Animaniacs.

Newsflash: If We Could Talk to the Animals...

...or, well, control them with telepathy. That is exactly what happens towards the end of the clip above: a human's brainwaves move the tail of a living, but anaesthetized, rodent. Admit it: making furry little slaves is what people who want to talk to animals really want to do.

Here's the whole deal on that clip: Researcher Seung-Schik Yoo at Harvard Medical School has successfully linked a human's mind with a rat's body. Several volunteers were hooked up to a numbed rat via EEG's, which are basically your standard electrodes. A certain EEG pattern would stimulate the rat's motor center, making it move. It is piggybacking off of a previous experiment that surgically linked the brains of two rats together, allowing them to cooperate at an unparalleled rate. Now, look, no surgery necessary!

What's really creepy is that the article is geared towards controlling other people like living puppets. There are a million creepy uses for human-controlled rat puppets, but a million and a half creepier reasons for wanting to control other people. Call us paranoid, but this article just came right out and said, "yeah, we wanna do this with humans." Creepy.

Some say that the test is completely invalid. The rat was under painkillers, so there's no way to tell if it was really being mind controlled or not. The link is still astonishing, and it's neat that the human mind can manipulate an animal body. Imagine how many people would sign up to be dogs for a day if given the chance.

Source: NewScientist.com.

Newsflash: Dragonflies Capable of Primate-Level Cognition.

"Insect" and "complex" rarely appear in the same sentence.  Generally, we think of them as simple, primitive animals that largely exist to be eaten by other animals or squished by primate boots. No matter how often we call ants "eusocial," we can't help but get a little bothered when they come to share our picnic. 

But are they really that much lower than us? The ant has long been hailed for its mechanical work ethic. Despite how much some of us loathe fleas and roaches, they are among the world's finest survivors. The very progression and reproduction rate of humanity has been compared to that of rodents, viruses, and insects. It should be no surprise that we use them so much as examples, especially since some insects have brains on par with primates. Yes, the Insect Apocalypse is nigh.

At the very least, it has been found that dragonflies are capable of something called "selective attention." Basically, a dragonfly can hone in on one thing while there are a million things going on around it. Every other insect has ADD by comparison. Full article below:

"By: Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
Published: 12/27/2012 07:03 PM EST on LiveScience

Dragonflies lack humans' big brains, but they still get the job done, according to new research that suggests that these insects have brain cells capable of feats previously seen only in primates.

Specifically, the dragonflies can screen out useless visual information to focus on a target, a process called selective attention. The new study, published Dec. 20 in the journal Current Biology, is the first to find brain cells devoted to selective attention in an invertebrate animal.
Selective attention is crucial for responding to one stimulus among the dozens of distractions that clamor for notice at any given time, said Steven Wiederman of the University of Adelaide in Australia.

"Imagine a tennis player having to pick out a small ball from the crowd when it's traveling at almost 200 kilometers an hour," Wiederman said in a statement. "You need selective attention in order to hit that ball back into play."

But little is known about how the brain locks onto its targets and ignores all else. To find out, Wiederman, who is from the university's Center for Neuroscience Research, and his colleague David O'Carroll turned to an unlikely animal. The researchers have long studied insect vision, and the dragonfly turns out to be quite adept in that arena. [Photos: Dew-Covered Dragonflies & Other Sparkling Insects]
 
"The dragonfly hunts for other insects, and these might be part of a swarm — they're all tiny moving objects," Wiederman said. "Once the dragonfly has selected a target, its neuron activity filters out all other potential prey. The dragonfly then swoops in on its prey — they get it right 97 percent of the time."

Using a glass probe with a tip 1,500 times smaller than a human hair, the researchers measured the neuronal activity that enables such amazing aerial hunting. A similar process is at work in the primate brain, O'Carroll said in a statement, but researchers weren't expecting to see the same thing in an insect that evolved 325 million years ago.

"We believe our work will appeal to neuroscientists and engineers alike," O'Carroll said. "For example, it could be used as a model system for robotic vision. Because the insect brain is simple and accessible, future work may allow us to fully understand the underlying network of neurons and copy it into intelligent robots."" - Full article here.

Bogleech has been going on and on about the eventual total domination of the human race by insects. I'm starting to think he was onto something.