Saturday, October 22, 2005

Wasps Trained to find Bombs and Other Interesting Stuff

Like the title says.

I've often wondered why we aren't trying more stuff like this. I read somewhere that B. F. Skinner trained pigeons to act as guidance systems for missiles during WWII, but the U.S. military thought the idea was cracked and wouldn't use it. God, think about the awesome technological advantage we would have enjoyed if that idea had been developed! I've also read about the Israelis using heat-detecting beetles or somesuch to detect whether someone has crossed the border at a certain place. At any rate, animals, insects, and even plants are basically very complicated machines, already "designed" and produced, just lying around. We really ought to see what useful things they can be trained to do instead of focusing exculsively on building new mechanical devices from the ground up.

Furthermore it seems to me that we should be thinking in terms of linking up such biological components into complexes of biological components (here's the wasp module, it detects x; here's the dog component, it processes y) and integrating those complexes with mechanical devices.

AND we should be thinking about selective breeding (e.g. of wasps, mice, bacteria, whatever) to accomplish such tasks more effectively. If, e.g., wasps really are good bomb detectors, we should selectively breed the best of them to produce new generations of wasps in which the desired trait is enhanced.

Lastly: has anyone else read that dogs are actually better expolosives detectors than those expensive machines at the airport, but that the U.S. won't use them for some crackpot reason (e.g. some people are afraid of dogs, or that the presence of bomb-sniffing dogs makes people more nervous than the presence of bomb-detective machines or some such crap)? Am I misremembering? Or are we really that stupid?

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Don't you remember the Katrina killer dolphin story? ("Respected investigator receiving intelligence from sources close to the government" can be code for loony but Smithsonian Magazine wouldn't lie to us, would they?)

2:26 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Holy _Day of the Dolphin_, Batman!

3:11 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just imagine, we could have swarms of bio-engineered, nano-cyborg, laser wasps!

I understand that there's a new graphic novel out about a cat, a dog, and rabbit cyborg assassins that escape. I think it's called We3.

3:28 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There has been at least one project using dogs to literally sniff out cancer in humans.

The biosensors that animals have display both a sensitivity and a selectivity to target molecules which our present technology can only achieve with massive amounts of machinery, reagents, and training to comprehend the results.

8:14 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

If you like dog adoption I think you'll like what you find at DogTwist

11:04 PM  

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