Saturday, October 16, 2004

Cybernetic Sharks, steered by remote control

Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Health / Science / Biologist tries to steer a shark, nose first:
Funded by - who else - DARPA, Jelle Atema is working on creating a cyborg shark.
"Jelle Atema wants to understand a shark's brain well enough to take it over -- to get it to obey commands to smell and sense what's going on in the water around it.

'I want to sit here in my office, call up Charlie Shark out in Hawaii, and say, "Go follow that wake,"' said Atema, who splits his time between Boston University and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. Ultimately, he said, a shark could help the military by surveying hard-to-reach areas for dangerous chemicals or other hazards."

...Yeah, and maybe just eat a few US enemies, illegal aliens, whatever. I see an updated version of Jaws in the making...

2 Comments:

Blogger Allison Muri said...

A fine idea; alas, William Gibson beat you to it in "Johnny Mnemonic," which features a rather heroic, and apparently sentient, cybernetic dolphin wired to the Net.

7:58 AM  
Blogger Meshon said...

That dolphin in "Johnny Mnemonic" was an ex-military operative if I remember correctly. It had become a junkie, probably from post-traumatic stress disorder. In a side note, Gibson has these epidermal drug patches in some of his stories that work a lot like nicotine patches. I think the first reference to them came out in '85 or '86... which was the same time the first patent for this delivery system had been applied for. Gibson's brain must be floating way out ahead, on the bleeding edge.

11:55 AM  

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