Chinese Develop Remote Controlled Pigeons 238
Many readers sent us links to the story about Chinese scientists developing pigeons whose flight can be controlled remotely. The best coverage may be Wired's, both because they link to the English language version of the original Peoples Daily Online release, and because of the (disturbing) photos. The birds can be commanded to fly left, right, up, or down. Reader KDan writes, "A number of obvious uses jump out to me... the remote-controlled pigeons will finally allow us to create an efficient implementation of RFC 1149 and RFC 2549."
RFC 2549 (Score:4, Funny)
Routing to the max.
If you set the evilbit can you make your pigeon crap on specified targets?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:RFC 2549 (Score:4, Interesting)
Why stop at crapping on targets?. I bet the American security services are worried. Now there's a real risk of using one of these Pigeons as a remote spying device. Imagine an innocent looking pigeon sitting on a window ledge, but really its fitted with a microphone and remote control. It would be ideal for spying.
Re: (Score:2)
Or... (Score:2)
Now -that- would be scary.
Maybe fitted with nuclear weapons AND microphones... =/
-Pigeons of Death, able to record your screams of fear and anguish!
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Just Like Those Coconuts? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why stop at crapping on targets?. I bet the American security services are worried. Now there's a real risk of using one of these Pigeons as a remote spying device. Imagine an innocent looking pigeon sitting on a window ledge, but really its fitted with a microphone and remote control. It would be ideal for spying.
This is an intel nightmare. Why? Because pontentially, you could use any animal other than just pigeons. Say cats, bats, or other animals that are actually native to you
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
yaaay! (Score:2, Funny)
left, right, forward and of course.... fire!
get them to eat berries first for a full on multicolour pebble dashing.
and wait until my neighbour is washing his car.
(of course a small head mounted camera with crosshairs target scope would be good as well
ah, delight.
A few questions (Score:3)
Will we see a Pokemon-genre game where you breed pigeons?
A shame we will never know what this feels like for the pigeon. Is it really being forced to turn left against its will, or does the pigeon experience it as a sudden desire to turn left?
In the TNG canon, did the Borg originate with pigeons?
Re: (Score:2)
If it's anything like the way they did something similar to rats before, they do it by stimulating an impulse that has previously been trained to make the animal turn in a desired direction -- i.e., more like the sudden desire thing. They could, theoretically, break the training. In practice, I doubt it happens much (at le
Re: (Score:2)
Were you forced to make that post against your will, or did you feel a sudden desire to post tenuously-connected comments?
BEGIN free_will_debate
Re: (Score:2)
Heheh. Now I'm imagining a wiimote pigeon.
Re: (Score:2)
You're targeting camera may need to be closer to the, er, "payload delivery end" of the bird for higher accuracy.
Cheers
Re: (Score:2)
Chinese conspiracy! (Score:4, Funny)
Am I the only one... (Score:4, Funny)
Militarization (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Of course the bird flu. That's what birds do! A whole flock of them flu over my house this morning.
Flap flap flap flap flap... (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
If this was invented in America (Score:3, Funny)
Philip Reeve (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Daniel
Re: (Score:2)
Um the pigeons just want us to think that. In reality, if it was found out that birds were that kind of threat, we'd remove all flying wildlife from the US. It sounds difficult. I think we could do it in a very short amount of time
Re:Philip Reeve (Score:4, Interesting)
Cool (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
To the point:
The primary sensory and locomotor areas of the brain are very well mapped (and have been so for 20+ years now). It is trivial to implant electrodes into a sensory area which will cause you extreme pain p
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
An Army of remotely controlled (or coerced) soldiers that can't defect or even take a piss without the right control signal...
Has anyone else here read "Single Combat" by Dean Ing?
Re:Cool (Score:4, Interesting)
It is just pain feedback (optionally with pleasure via thalamic stimulation) along with some trivial conditioning. I am fairly sure about this being so because we do not understand how a bird flies aerodynamically and do not have good enough mapping of second and higher level functions of the mammal brain to control it any better.
This means that if this is applied to soldiers they can still do things their masters do not like, just get punished more and more if they do. Nearly impossible for an animal to override such conditioning, but achieveable for a human. Dune and the Bene Gesserit test comes to mind along with many "manhood" tests performed by South (using fire ants) and North American Indians.
None the less, the only question I am interested is the longitude, latitude and altitude of this chap lab.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If someone was pricking your left leg with a pin would you turn? You'd probably flinch or something.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The exact same of research has been done in the State University of New York. See http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/05 01_020501_roborats.html/ [nationalgeographic.com]. Except the target animal was mice instead of pigeon. P
Re:Cool (Score:5, Informative)
This is presumably how come State University of New York [nationalgeographic.com] no longer has a biology lab. Wait. I missed that news. Perhaps it didn't happen.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I believe that rather than trying to use pain/pleasure to "nudge" a person, this particular approach involved skewing a person's sense of balance. Correcting the
Stop the pigeon (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Finally! (Score:2, Interesting)
So, when will I be able to sign up for IPOP in my area (IP Over Pidgeon)?
This sounds horrible (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt the Chinese Government sees it the same way. Imagine the benefit to the efficent movement of commuters, especially when there are distracting demonstrations slowing people down and wasting their time. Crowd dispersal with the press of a button.
Re: (Score:2)
This is almost certainly not taking over the pigeon's "free will" (if it ever had any such thing), at least not to any greater extent than a normal training program would.
Whe
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
> animal's free will very disturbing.
Oh... You are NOT going to like being part of Corporate America after college.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's ridiculous. The point of free will is not how you arrive at a decision or how you rationalise it, but rather that you can make the decisions at all. It doesn't matter how your brain goes about it.
What matters is that there is a process in the brain that makes decisions, and they're messing with it.
And free will and consciousness being illusions are just catchphrases. In order to be subject to an illusion, you need consciousness in the firs
No, it's not ! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is neither a ridiculous nor trivial idea. There's a vast body of work in philosophy and brain science that tells us that it is so. While our intuition says it ain't so, history has shown that intuition isn't very good when it comes to the profoundest truths. "That's ridiculous!" was most probably the first response to the person who declared that the earth is not flat. Thin
Re: (Score:2)
You seem fairly
In Soviet Russia...... (Score:3, Funny)
Obvious use: intelligence gathering (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, political assassinations via C4 bombs delivered by pigeons might be a possibility, too. Or, biological/chemical agent delivery to otherwise protected areas...
I am having some tiny chills running down my spine.
Re: (Score:2)
Denial of service... (Score:5, Funny)
brain-computer interface (Score:2, Insightful)
Ugly and non-ethical, yes, but most details on animal experiments are like this one.
Always wanted brain implant? - well, some research must be done.
Like it? No? Me either, but at the end people will forget all ugly parts and will use direct brian computer interface.
PigeonRank! (Score:2, Funny)
Lets put a chip in the head of those scientists (Score:2, Interesting)
How about we put chips in the heads of those so-called scientist to control their movement against their will, and see how they like it. They'd probably change their minds about this being such a great idea. Oh wait, they can't change their minds because we've taken away their free will by putting a damn chip in their brain!
"Science" gets
Do it, bitch! (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Up, up, down, down . . . (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
antipersonnel (Score:2)
There was a story a few days ago about light winged army bots that are useful in Iraq. If the other side adds pigeons we may need to have a large number of armed bots to secure a periphery around troops distant enough to keep them safe. This reminds me of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age [wikipedia.org] (sounding l
Mod Parent Up (Score:2)
-kgj
Clarification (Score:2)
Sure, but can they fly (Score:2)
Japan China and weird weapons of WW-II (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Potty Pigeon! (Score:2)
More weight! (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm still waiting on my remote-controlled beer fetching attack monkey. Keep at it, scientists!
new chinese firewall: hawks (Score:2)
look away, child, it's a hegemonist net surfer....
Cyborg Pigeon Slave Revolt (Score:2)
(from Miller/SNL/Ecuador sometime circa 1990)
Skinner and pigeon-controlled bombs. (Score:2)
RFC 1149 Implementation (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Whats the application? What about ethics? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nazi KZ Doctors???
Pigeons are not people....
Repeat that a couple of times, please, perhaps it will sink in.
A lot of this un-ethical kind of stuff is going on in your backyard university lab probably, it's just not in the news. Russians tried to do the same with dolphins and other animals, Israelis do this with monkeys (see hear [all-creatures.org]). You should go tour your local pig farm and see how those animals are treated.
Just because these are Chinese scientists, i.e. foreigners (and of course, probably commie terrorists, right?) that we are all appalled.
Re: (Score:2)
Please provide links to prospective clinical studies that prove this?
That claim is a neat chunk of misinformation possibly of the same magnitude as Linus Pauling's (completely false) claim 30 years ago that Vitamin C cures the common cold...
MOST children are cruel to/kill animals in their childhood. Not all of them turn out to be
Re: (Score:2)
Oh the horror! Won't anyone think of the kittens!?
Prejudice, prejudice, prejudice. (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Make a judgement that someone is unethical based on one's own perception.
2. Reinforce the perception with extreme or individual incidents that are in line with that judgement.
3. Dismiss evidences that contradict the judgement or undermine the credibility of it.
4. When the position is not defendable in a debate, use unsubstantiated claim or cite anecdotal evidence.
5. Repeat 2-4 as necessary.
Re: (Score:2)
Best quote I've seen in a while. Mod parent up!
Re: (Score:2)
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=224072 &cid=18143822 [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Of course the Chinese must be on something.
In other news, some Chinese scientist has built a humanoid robot and western conpiracy theorists are accusing China of prepare an attack of the clones!
Carry on with your imagination.
Hey, pigeons ain't people, bud. (Score:2)
Re:Whats the application? What about ethics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry, the pigeons have all signed informed consent forms - see the peck-marks? Our lawyers also told them that eating the birdseed we provided implied their agreement to the experiment. And they ate it.
The chinese opened their heads and stuck wires into them. NO big deal and nothing really scientific.
Right, I mean, I read your articles about how the pigeon brain works. This was a totally unneccesary experiment, since we had that knowledge already. Why do we need more "proof"?
If I'd be in charge these scientists would lose their funding, their job and their accreditation all at once
I wouldn't be so fast to cut the funding of a group who can control animals remotely. Have you never seen the movie "The Birds"? Maybe one morning you'll be pecked to death by 2000 angry pigeons...
not very far from what the Nazi KZ Doctors did to the people captured in the camps
Umm, sticking electrodes into the brains of birds, with proper aseptic and anaesthetic techniques (after all, you want a functional bird at the end of it in order to get useful data), is not quite the same as dunking people in ice water just to see how long the average survival time is...
Bogus? Bogus! (Score:2)
"It scares me a little seeing a lack of ethical concerns here on subjects like these. The chinese didn't develop these pigeons. Nature and evolution did. The chinese opened their heads and stuck wires into them. No big deal and nothing really scientific."
Just "sticking wires into them" would have been unlikely to produce very cool results, aside from croaked pigeons. And that's where the science part comes into play.
"This sort of 'research' goes to show that some areas of modern science are even more bogus,
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
When you fix something, do it right
Re: (Score:2)
"Seconded. But sadly for everything in the known universe, ethical values don't seem to matter that much."
We can keep doing this all day if you lot don't stop being so half-arsed about it.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I know, adding a symetrical cheek to make it a full-arsed Universe is a GoodIdea(TM), but I don't think we can streach the budget enough to afford such a radical change. For a start, just think of how many god years it will take to test the whole Universe for the absence of ethical values. And who's going to do the documnets, sacred texts don't write themselves you know.
Re: (Score:2)
We need a funny/insightfull combo mod.
Certain words are unsuitable for some nations (Score:2)
It's just like the fact that the French who fought Nazi in WWII are called French resistance but the Iraqis fighting US army should not be called Iraqi resistance, only Iraqi insurgency. Of course, Chechen suicide bombers are surely brave freedom fighters. A palestinian doing the same is a terrorist.
I'm confused (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)