Tag Archives: animals

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"I, for one, welcome our new robot milkmaids…"

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644px-Cow_portraitOK, this isn’t actually new technology–it’s been around for years, just not in this part of the world –but it’s the first I’ve heard of it, and it struck me as an interesting example of how advanced technology seeps into everything while you’re not looking. (Via CBC News.)

A Saskatchewan dairy farm is using high-tech robotics and a computer program to milk the cows while the farmers sleep…

Each cow in the herd wears a chip that communicates with a central computer.

The system begins with a cow, feeling the urge to be milked or fed, moving through a series of gates to a stall where the animal knows it will be tended to. The computer system knows if Bessie is due for a milking or ready for more feed based on the history it has stored for each animal.

Sensors pick up the cow’s chip to provide location information, allowing the computer to open the appropriate gates to guide the animal along to either a feeding station or the milking system.

Inside the milking stall, a robot arm takes over. It uses laser beams to check udders and direct a fine spray to wash and disinfect teats. Then it attaches hoses and starts milking…

Next thing you know the cows will be blogging. (By the way, CBC’s headline is pretty funny: “The farmer in the DELL® uses a computer to milk the herd.”)

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]computers,agriculture,animals,robotics[/tags]

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Cloning technique could bring species back from extinction

This Northern White Rhino lives at San Diego ZooIt seems to be a week for biological-related stories here on Futurismic. Using skin cells from the nearly extinct Northern White Rhino, scientists can reprogram them back to an embryonic state, from which they can create sperm and eggs with the animal’s genes. An animal can then be created in vitro or through a surrogate mother from the Southern species of White Rhino. There are only 3 or 4 of the Northern variety left in the wild.

Professor Robert Millar, the director of the Medical Research Council’s Reproductive Sciences Unit at Edinburgh University, who is leading the study, said: “There are a lot of African animals under the threat of extinction. We want to protect their genomes, but you have to protect their habitats as well. This is one of the ways of dealing with the problem, especially when the animals get to such low numbers in the wild. It is a method we need to start to get into place as an insurance policy – it’s clearly do-able according to the laboratory work.”

This poses an extremely interesting moral dilemma. Is it worse to clone an animal or to let its species go extinct? And if the animal was cloned, does that make it a legal member of the species?

[via the Independent, Northern White Rhino in San Diego Zoo picture by Eliya]

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Won’t somebody think of the robots?

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robot horse Jamais Cascio is a sensitive soul; he doesn’t like seeing beasts of burden being abused and pushed around. Even robotic ones:

“My reaction to seeing this robot kicked paralleled what I would have had if I’d seen a video of a pack mule or a real big dog being kicked like that, and (from anecdotal conversations) I know I’m not the only one with that kind of immediate response. True, it wasn’t nearly as strong a shocked feeling for me as it would have been with a real animal, but it was definitely of the same character. It simply felt wrong.”

This throws an interesting light on the “robot rights” debates that keep surfacing. While I think we can all agree that a non-sentient machine doesn’t require the vote or union-mandated coffee breaks, this sort of psychological reaction to machines with a visual semblance of life may cause problems in early-adopter workplaces. [image by TwoBlueDay]

After all, even battle-hardened US Army colonels have been known to balk at sending machines to their doom.

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Iranians accost GPS-equipped spy-squirrels?

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squirrelThe news out of the Middle East just gets weirder by the day – often with an animal flavour to it, so it seems. Less than a fortnight after the British military had to deny deploying a crack team of attack badgers into Basra, the Iranian government has announced that they have captured a number of squirrels with GPS and other spying kit embedded in their bodies. I’m very skeptical as to how true this story will turn out to be, but it’s still one hell of a headline. [Image by Ogwen]