Remote-controlled roaches
DRINKING WATER MIGHT be better for us than fruit juice or fizzy pop, but sometimes our taste buds yearn for something with a little more flavour. The Right Cup is a scented vessel that tricks your brain into thinking you’re drinking flavoured water. The fruity scent – choose from lemon-lime, orange, mixed berry or apple – is added to the plastic cup during manufacturing, and your brain mistakes the scent for flavour. This approach means you’re not consuming any sugars or chemical preservatives. Patent pending
/ DECEMBER 2015 THE NEXT TIME you’re sitting at your computer, quietly seething as it does exactly what you didn’t tell it to do, let Bill Gates sort it out. Microsoft is patenting a system that detects when you’re stressed out and helps to calm you down. It might detect your ire by measuring the pressure you exert on your keyboard, listening for expletives, or recognising the tell-tale features of an angry face. It would then try to soothe you – perhaps adjusting your room’s lighting, or telling you it’s time to take a walk. And breathe… Patent pending HERE’S SOMETHING that’s unlikely to make it to the top of many Christmas lists: cockroaches that can be controlled with a joystick.
A team at Case Western Reserve University inserted tiny electrodes into the part of the insects’ brains that respond to antennal and visual stimuli. They then recorded the neuronal activity and filmed the insects’ movements. By making statistical links between movements and spikes in neuronal activity, they were able to figure out the signals associated with the insects walking at different speeds and changing direction.
They then passed electrical currents through these same electrodes, turning the insects into remote controlled roaches. Similar experiments in the past worked by stimulating the insects’i ’ antennae, ratherh thanh neurones inside the brain.
“It’s like a joystick on the animal,” said researcher Joshua Martin. “We can control its direction and alter its speed.”
The team believes that similar processes may exist in other animals. “It is highly likely that descending motor control such as this also resides in all legged animals, including us,” lead author Roy Ritzmann said. “So this kind of study, with the technical advantages that insects afford researchers, can help us to understand how movement is controlled in complex environments.”
The cockroach’s control system could also prove to be a useful model for building selfdriving cars and robots that can manoeuvre around obstacles on their own, or for controlling drones, the researchers said.