TJ @ 11-06-2008
Fans of one of Terry Pratchett’s early comic science-fiction novels The Dark Side of the Sun, will be familiar with the idea of robotic versions of insects being used as “bugs” to spy on people.
This is an idea that is being enthusiastically embraced by the US military, with many small UAVs in development for surveillance purposes.
And there is even more insect-themed biomimicry on it’s way from the labs: the dragonfly is of particular interest, according to researchers:
Dragonflies are one of few creatures that utilize four independently controlled wings to fly,
allowing them to hover, dart, glide, move backward, and change directions rapidly. Looking to understand such abilities, scientists at the Royal Veterinary College, in England, and the University of Ulm, in Germany, have developed a robotic dragonfly to measure the current flows over and under the wings at different flap cycles. While most of the dragonfly hovering scenarios were not efficient, the team found that if the lower wings are beating slightly ahead of the top wings, the double set of wings proves more efficient at generating lift, employing 22 percent less power to lift the same weight as a single pair.
Well good luck to them. Fortunately for privacy-lovers/paranoids it seems that practical fabrication of these insect spies is still some way in the future.
[story from Technology Review][image by Lori Greig]
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Tomas Martin @ 21-02-2008
For a number of years now biologists and farmers alike have been concerned about levels of honeybees around the world, with many hives collapsing due to what’s known as CCD - Colony Collapse Disorder. It leads people to find strangely abandoned hives with a few dead bees but most gone elsewhere. The causes are unknown - it could be a number of fungal or viral diseases, or interference from cell phone towers messing up their ability to find home. It could also be mites, global warming, GM crops, pretty much anything. As honeybees are used massively in pollinating commercial fruit and vegetables, this is a real concern not just for a species of insect, but also for us.
Happily a certain gourmet Ice Cream company is on the case. Haagen Dazs has already donated money to some of the researchers trying to find what’s going on with the bees. Now it’s also making a bee-themed honey Ice Cream, with profits going towards our stripy friends. Coincidentally, did you know Haagen Dazs is not actually Scandanavian? The name was created by its founders in America and both words are actually made up. The closest translation in any language is an Iranian phrase meaning ‘garbage can’.
[via Daily Galaxy, image by BugMan50]
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Paul Raven @ 09-08-2007
I’ve blogged this here before, but it deserves mentioning once again just for its sheer science fictional majesty - good old DARPA have been implanting minute electro-mechanical devices into moth pupae, so that when the insects hatch they’re fully wired for … well, that’s the thing. They’re still working on a viable application for the idea (which is an odd methodology, but what the hell, they have the budget for it), but the idea of using the bugged bugs as some sort of reconnaissance companion for fighter pilots seems to be the way they want to go. [Gizmodo]
By the way, Wired’s Danger Room blog is on-site covering the current DARPATech convention, should you hunger for more weirdness of a similar ilk. [Image by Jurvetson]
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