DARPA Funds Remote Control Sharks

An anonymous reader writes "From Undersea Spies: Turning Sharks into Robotic Sentries "It seems like science fiction, but the U.S. military would like to use sharks as underwater spies. The folks at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), who dream up the future of weapons and military systems, envision squads of sharks prowling the oceans with sensors that could transmit evidence of explosives or other threats.""

Now all that's missing

[Rosco P. Coltrane (209368)]

are the friggin' laser beams and head mounts...

Re:

[msobkow (48369)]

Yeah, but the naval commanders could never pull off the pinkie-lip snear as well as they did in the movies. Plus, having a bunch of bald or balding military commanders making such comments would really freak people out. :D

Didn't they used to do the same thing with dolphins back in the 1960's-70's? IIRC animal rights activists objected to the bottlenose being trained to carry bombs.

Yikes! The US military was training sea life to be suicide terrorist bombers! :eek:

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[LiquidCoooled (634315)]

So, you expect to be able to open the account create page, fill in the details, submit your captcha three times, wait for your acceptance email, signin, re-find the page and actually type and submit your clichéd comment before a subscriber?

Theres optimism if ever I saw it!

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[sanman2 (928866)]

Nah, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for sharks, when you hear about the horror stories from shark attack reports. I don't care if they're given disproportionate press coverage, the fact is that sharks are ruthless, cold-bloodedly remorseless killers. If we can get them under our control with brain implants, then that's fine by me.

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[TheSpoom (715771)]

I think you're confusing them with bears.

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[Walt Dismal (534799)]

Such a horrific, sickening abuse of life is appalling.

I take it you've never been to Taco Bell?

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[raphae (754310)]

Elaborate please...

Sure I'll elaborate: think of all the experimentation it took to figure this out. How many times did the sickos cut open the skulls of sentient beings and mess around with their brains to get the results they wanted? How many failed experiments were there? How many grotesque atrocities were perpetrated in the operating room? Its not too hard to visualize the animal laying there on an operating table with its skull cut open and blood and brains everywhere while these "researchers" slopped about. Its

Animals make a fine robotics platforms

[Dr. Eggman (932300)]

So long as there aren't any speedy blue ones to foul it all up...

First five posts - all about lasers

[PIPBoy3000 (619296)]

Please, how far can you beat a dead shark?

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[WallaceAndGromit (910755)]

Aparently to at least +5 funny

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[wik (10258)]

This research is like kicking dead sharks down the beach.

I promise, no lasers...

[The Monster (227884)]

<doorbell rings:>

Who is it?

Candygram.

Does that mean

[lupine_stalker (1000459)]

That all the people killed in Jaws were terrorists and/or illegal immigrants?

Not another laser joke

[unitron (5733)]

So does this mean that DARPA has officially jumped the shark?

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[dangitman (862676)]

They could probably jump the sharks through hoops at Seaworld to get some extra funding $$$$$. But you'd really want the Fonz at the controls for maximum effect.

it used to be dolphins

[quixote9 (999874)]

Really. They were even training them to do various things. (Look for subs or something. I don't remember.) There was talk of training them to attach mines to enemy vessels. Then an outcry began--rightfully, as far as I'm concerned--that it was a Bad Thing to use such intelligent and simpatico animals for this. Now, I see, they've moved to sharks. No lobby supporting them, I'll bet, but the military also won't be able to train them to do much. Sharks are well below flounders in brain power.

Re:it used to be dolphins

[Hal_Porter (817932)]

Really. They were even training them to do various things. (Look for subs or something. I don't remember.) There was talk of training them to attach mines to enemy vessels. Then an outcry began--rightfully, as far as I'm concerned--that it was a Bad Thing to use such intelligent and simpatico animals for this. Now, I see, they've moved to sharks. No lobby supporting them, I'll bet, but the military also won't be able to train them to do much. Sharks are well below flounders in brain power.

They're not training them, they're remote controlling them

http://www.bu.edu/alumni/buforward/archives/Dec_20 06/articles/spies.html [bu.edu]

DARPA turned to Jelle Atema, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of biology at the Boston University Marine Program, who for many years has been researching how marine animals use their sense of smell. Atema proposed that because sharks are expert at tracking odors over very long distances, the key to steering a shark was to follow its nose. With more than a year of DARPA funding, which ended last year, Atema was able to use electrical stimulation of a sharks brain, mimicking odor, to guide the shark around a large tank.

So the simplicity of the shark's brain is actually an advantage. From the shark's point of view, it's chasing the smell, presumably, of prey.

Interestingly, something like this happens naturally. Parasitic wasps perform brain surgery to zombify roaches.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/03/wasp_performs _roachb.html [boingboing.net]

Makes you wonder if you could do it with higher animals actually. Even though we seem to have aa certain amount of free will about how we achieve our objectives of eating and reproducing and avoiding pain, there's probably low level hardware in our the oldest parts of our brains which enforces those objectives by sending reward/punishment signals 'up' to the high level, conscious bits of our brains. I can imagine that if you attached electrodes in the right places, you could run mammals and even humans in remote controlled zombie mode too. It would be a hellish experience though, since you'd know your free will had been strongly curtailed.

Still, look on the bright side, most /.'s seem to be quite skilled at ignoring the signals from their cerebellum to reproduce. So long as the evil scientists don't wire the neurons that reward you for successfully finding carbohydrate based junk food we should be immune.

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[darkfire5252 (760516)]

They already solved that problem [slashdot.org].

By using electricity to manipulate the nerves in the inner ear in the same way that the scientists are manipulating the nerves in the nose, scientists were able to make a person feel like they had to go a certain direction in order to keep their balance.

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[EtherealStrife (724374)]

Yea the human model has been in use for some time now. DARPA lent out the prototype to Cheney in the late 90's, for field testing. The remote can't handle linguistics as well as they'd hoped, but otherwise it's worked perfectly.

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[IchBinEinPenguin (589252)]

It would be a hellish experience though, since you'd know your free will had been strongly curtailed.

For a second there I thought I was back in the Vista thread...

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[Hal_Porter (817932)]

Actually, I found this parasite fasinating

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=44092 [medicalnewstoday.com]

It knows how to regulate the human immune system for it's own purposes. It actually seems quite close to being a symbiote, since it can treat Crohn's disease. Reminds me a bit of Goa'uld in SG-1 actually.

But I guess Rabies [wikipedia.org] manages to change host behaviour in a way that encourages transmission.

I didn't know...

[denttford (579202)]

...that DARPA has a division researching /. trolling.

DARPA or DHARMA?

[SirBruce (679714)]

Do the sharks have logos on them?

Bruce

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[Patik (584959)]

For those at don't get it, it's a reference to Lost [abc.com] (and actually the first thing I thought of before laser beams).

NEW and IMPROVED!

[Alsee (515537)]

US army, now with more lawyers!

-

The Only Thing Worse

[jaypeg (711764)]

The only thing worse than roving gangs of US Navy mind controlled sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads is a land shark from Mother Russia with a beowulf cluster!

Overlords

[youthoftoday (975074)]

I, for one, welcome our new robotic shark overlords.

Sounds great at first....

[Starker_Kull (896770)]

...but all they'll be doing in the long run is teach other navies' that don't wish to be spied on to take out any fish that happens to wander too close - or better yet, just preemptively take out all large sealife so as not to interfere with our wargames. Animal rights activists will love that one.

OTOH, we might have a new way of tracking enemy submarines - look for the trail of dead fish floating on the surface...

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[hazzey (679052)]

...but all they'll be doing in the long run is teach other navies' that don't wish to be spied on to take out any fish that happens to wander too close

But we have already started on this path with all of the experiments with dolphins detecting divers and the like.

Actually, why are they using sharks at all? Besides having sharp, pointing teeth, I wouldn't imagine that they would be any easier to train than dolphins.

I love it.

[MobileTatsu-NJG (946591)]

A story comes along about a defense company funding shark development and the site lights up with countless ameteur attempts at SNL-quality writing.

Shark fin soup

[alshithead (981606)]

I can see it now..."Waiter there's a laser in my soup!"

just the title sounds ...

[josepha48 (13953)]

.. like a bad movie I saw on SciFi. It sounds almost like Peter Benchley's "Creature", which was about a mutated shark. Then again there is that movie set "Shark Attack" 1, 2 and 3.

I can read articles that are like this!

sharks with frickin' laser beams ..

[rs232 (849320)]

'Dr. Evil: You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!' [imdb.com]

Sounds similar to Fabien Cousteau's device

[Kerhop (652872)]

So it's just an automated vesion of Fabien Cousteau [apple.com]'s fake shark?

Countermeasures

[DoofusOfDeath (636671)]

I think the main military benefit to this technology is that it will force hostile nations to build chum launchers as a countermeasure. The notion is so disgusting it will reduce reenlistment rates for their navies.

Hello extinction, hello dupe

[perrin (891)]

This proposal is unethical on so many levels. Most urgently - many species of shark are already nearing extinction, and if subs and other sea vessels that would like to go undetected start killing any sharks that come close "just in case", they will disappear quickly. As noted in this slashdot story: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/2 3/0214242 [slashdot.org], and this one: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/1 7/1815250 [slashdot.org]

Besides, this story is a dupe: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/0 2/0031225 [slashdot.org] was the previous one.

Tracking Tags

[X-rated Ouroboros (526150)]

I was thinking about how we'll tag whales and dolphins with low power radio collars. It tracks time and depth and maybe a few other parameters. When the animal surfaces to breathe, the tag squirts off its collected data.

Why not tag animals with something that measures, say, salinity and temperature and then gives this data to our submarines? Or that detects the presence of explosives trace? Radiation? Large sound transients... like a mobile living hydrophone network.

obligatory mashup joke

[Wise Dragon (71071)]

In Soviet Russia, Shark jumps YOU!

And...

[Cyno01 (573917)]

LL Cool J will be the only one to survive...

Re:Attatch laser beams, and we have another sequel

[stonedcat (80201)]

I believe your post has jumped the shark.

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[Antony-Kyre (807195)]

I wonder whatever happened to the Funny modifier, and just leaving something at one or zero would be good enough.

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[Don_dumb (927108)]

Watch this - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118655/ [imdb.com] and all should become clear.

Re:Please update me

[by Anonymous Coward]

It's a line from Austin Powers [imdb.com] where Dr. Evil says that what he wanted was sharks with lasers on their heads and the other guy has to explain that sharks are endangered and so they settled for the next best thing -- sea bass.

Dr. Evil: You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have?
Number Two: Sea Bass.
Dr. Evil: [pause] Right.
Number Two: They're mutated sea bass.
Dr. Evil: Are they ill tempered?
Number Two: Absolutely.
Dr. Evil: Oh well, that's a start.

Correct link

[adnonsense (826530)]

Shurely you mean this [satirewire.com]?

Sea bass

[Latent Heat (558884)]

The original post should have been made under the Humor than the Science category. Yes, it is wrong and cruel to animals and perhaps a stupid use of tax money as well, and that makes it funny. No, there is nothing wrong to see humor in something that is wrong and cruel because that is one way to make people aware that something wrong and cruel is also stupid.

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[Shakrai (717556)]

No, there is nothing wrong to see humor in something that is wrong and cruel because that is one way to make people aware that something wrong and cruel is also stupid.

It's that same logic that compels me to point out that my Grandfather died at Auschwitz every time somebody starts talking about the Holocaust. Poor bastard fell out of a guard tower :(

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[leoc (4746)]

I agree 100% about the sharks. DARPA could not have come up with a better way to help ensure the extinction of sharks, because now every country that thinks they have something to worry about will be catching and killing as many sharks as they can find, and the species is already heavily fished and at risk [planetsave.com].

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[aliquis (678370)]

Didn't even thought about the possibility that during wars people might become even more affraid of them, anyway even the idea of "remote controlling" sharks, cockroaches or whatever is so fucked up. Let them live their lifes and do whatever they want to do with it.

Some idiot moderated me -1 aswell, sure the begining was filled with useless crap but I didn't liked the fact that ALL the comments I read had those retarded laser jokes in them and nothing was on topic.

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[Pichu0102 (916292)]

Ok, I've read them all so far and it's just BS comments about lasers.

You must be new here.

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[jeffeb3 (1036434)]

I agree, it's horrible. Puting tracking devices on sharks is totally invading their privacy.