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Science

Robot Fish That Swims Using Frog Muscles 12

Posted by michael from the gross-things-to-do-in-biology-class dept.
Pyr0Cantha writes "Umm.......found this on New Scientist quite interesting that in 1786 it was discovered that frog muscles twitched when an electrical current was put through them, only now it has been put to use."
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Robot Fish That Swims Using Frog Muscles More

Robot Fish That Swims Using Frog Muscles

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  • A: Where to put all these old robots?
    B: That French restaurant buys them.

  • Bionic Fish, using is super power frog muscles to save the day. Hey, it's like Mighty Mouse meets the six million dollar man.



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    ticks = jiffies;
    while (ticks == jiffies);
    ticks = jiffies;

  • "The military's interest could revolve around "exoskeletons" - prosthetic suits that will one day let soldiers run faster, jump higher or carry more weapons. Such systems might employ real muscle."

    Now this is exciting! All of us /.'ers will finally be able to kick sand in other jerks faces now.

  • MIT's Biomechatronics Group [mit.edu] is doing the research, and you can see a short (4 second) .avi movie of the robot swimming, in the middle of this [umich.edu] page.

    ______________

  • I know it's not the dissection of animals for research purposes. I have done that myself.

    I guess it's because with this we have the potential to go from using whole animals as laborers to using parts of animals. Instead of a video camera we could have a small box with an owl eye sticking out of it. Boy what fun at a birthday party. "Honey, do you have a fresh eye around anywhere? This one seems to be dying ..."

    For some reason I have this feeling that muscle and animal parts in general best belong on a body, or on a plate. I do not know if the technology of "borrowing" pieces of animals for mechanical use is something I want around me.

    And yes the theory of muscle-powered devices certainly does sound promising, but what about protecting these devices, not from oxidation, but from infection? What if your exoskeleton catches a cold? Would bioweapons -- or Sarin -- immobilize this device as easily as they currently immobilize soldiers? What about electricity? What would the benefits be, again?

  • If you read the article thourraly, there working on making muscle cultures, real muscle grow out of abody, into the shape needed. The frog muscle is just a proof of concept from how I read it. This is the type of stuff sci fi writers have jabbered about for ages. Machines made of muscle, either bounded with electronics (can we say cyborg fish here? Yes.) or grown as a machine whole from scratch. Unfortunately we'll have cyborg meat-machines for a while probably before they can grow purely biological meat machines. Ahh well. Neat neat stuff.
  • A curry eating bum, a megalomaniac hologram and a feline humanoid were watching a robot fish, when...
  • Think about it, the Brits had computers in the 1890's years and years before IBM (Babbage's Difference engine)

    They also invented the light bulb before the US, and had radio working in the 1870's (marconi). If you take a look at most technology, it is almost always a re-hash of something that went before, with a slightly different twist added by some new technique or material.

    The space shuttle is a direct descendant of the wright brother's triplane than took off at Kitty Hawk in 1912.

    So really, we should not be surprised when something old turns out to have a cool use.

    Sometime the past and history doesn't suck, occasionally it can be quite cool.

  • I mean, come on! I want my panther tail! *grin*
  • I remeber seeing an interesting article in Science News on a related topic. Basically, researchers had pulled the brain out of a lamprey, preserved it in some kind of device or solution, and hooked it up to a pair of wheels. The brain learned how to use the wheels to maneuver either away from or toward a light source (I can't remember which; whichever would be natural for a lamprey to want to do). Kind of takes this concept to the next level, neh? My brother pointed out that we don't really know what the lamprey's brain was thinking while hooked up to this device... perhaps it just experienced horrific pain when near the light, and thus learned to get away from it. Anyway, just thought you might find this interesting.
  • Well, they didn't actually use an entire lamprey brain, just took some tissue and hooked it up to a Khepera robot [k-team.com] and some light sensors. The robot then could be made to avoid or follow light sources. There's a was a brief article [newscientist.com] about it in the New Scientist.

  • For some reason the idea of doing medical research with animals does not strike me as wrong as this. I really do not understand my response, but something just strikes me as wrong about using living tissue in a machine. The idea of a cyborg does not even strike me as being wrong, not like this.

    I guess to me it is showing a complete disrespect to the donor organism -- a whole frog only good for a few muscle filaments. The destruction of the donor does not better anything else, it just bends a mechanical widget.

    There is no argument supportive of it. This does not remotely benefit humanity -- even primate collision testing had that dubious purpose. It does not feed another organism. It makes a widget go flip-flop.

    This is another one of those things that brings to mind the speech of do-gooder chaotician Ian Malcom in the movie "Jurassic Park", to paraphrase liberally:

    "We put so much effort into whether or not we
    could do this. We never thought about whether or not we should."

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