Tag: darpa

The Pentagon is training an army of bomb-sniffing cyborg locusts.

Tired: a plague of locusts

Wired: a legion of cybernetically-enhanced locusts trained by the US military to sniff bombs

That’s the new goal, according to Stars & Stripes magazine:

Navy-funded researchers have discovered that a locust’s sensitive “horns” can distinguish between the scents of TNT and other explosives — a development that one day could herald the deployment of bomb-sniffing, electronically augmented bug swarms.

The research by a team from Washington University in St. Louis, published this month in the science journal “Biosensors and Biolectronics: X,” is the first proof of concept for a system that aims to tap into the antennae and brainpower of garden-variety bugs to create an advanced bomb-detection sensor.

The work is funded by two Office of Naval Research grants totaling more than $1.1 million, and biomedical engineering professor Barani Raman believes it has the potential to produce a biorobotic sniffer that would be leaps ahead of entirely man-made “electronic noses.”

In the Washington University study, which is available to read online, the locusts were able to distinguish between the smells of common explosive chemicals such as TNT, DNT, RDX, PETN and ammonium nitrate — all in less than a second. Which is, admittedly, pretty impressive.

Insects like locusts also offer benefits over, say, bomb-sniffing dogs, in that they already tend to swarm together, and don’t require a lot of food and care. There’s also less of an ethical concern — no one cares if you attach sensors and cameras to a bug, but even military dogs still inspire a certain protective instinct in their human companions that could discourage such technological enhancements (or the experimentation required to figure out how to use them best).

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What could go wrong?ELECTRX has the nerve to envision revolutionary therapies for self-healing

Many chronic inflammatory diseases and mental health conditions affecting military service members and veterans involve abnormal activity in the peripheral nervous system, which plays a key role in organ function. Monitoring and targeted regulation of peripheral nerve signals offer great promise to help patients restore and maintain their health without surgery or drugs. Current neuromodulation devices are typically used as a last resort, however, because they are relatively large (about the size of a deck of cards), require invasive surgical implantation and often produce side effects due to their lack of precision. DARPA’s Electrical Prescriptions (ElectRx) program is seeking innovative research proposals to help transform neuromodulation therapies from last resort to first choice for a wide range of diseases.

ElectRx (pronounced “electrics”) aims to develop groundbreaking technologies that would use the body’s innate neurophysiology to restore and maintain health. In support of the White House’s brain initiative, ElectRx also seeks to accelerate understanding of specific neural circuits and their role in health and disease. Future therapies based on targeted peripheral neural stimulation could promote self-healing, reduce dependence on traditional drugs and provide new treatment options for illnesses.

ElectRx would leverage advanced sensing and stimulating technologies to target specific peripheral neural circuits that control organ functions. These feedback-controlled neuromodulation technologies would monitor health status and intervene as needed to deliver patient-specific therapeutic patterns of stimulation designed to restore a healthy physiological state. The program seeks to create ultraminiaturized devices that would require only minimally invasive insertion procedures such as injectable delivery through a needle.

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DARPA’s Man in Wuhan

Michael Callahan’s career began in USAID and in the bioweapons labs of the former Soviet Union, advancing the agenda of the global bioweapons and pharmaceutical cartels. He would take what he learned there to execute a massive expansion of DARPA’s biodefense portfolio and today finds himself squarely in the center of the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

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