Your dreams of commanding an unholy army of insectoid cyborgs may finally come true. Scientists at UC Berkeley showed off a remote-controlled Rhino beetle at a conference this week, demonstrating a mastery of electronic arthropod control by piloting the beetle around a room of creeped-out scientists like a William S. Burroughs RC plane.

To achieve such precision control, the scientists installed six electrodes into the beetle’s brain and muscles. They strapped a circuit board, radio receiver, and battery to its back and used a basic hobby RC controller to fly the bug.

Turns out the Rhino beetle is a great platform for this sort of thing. It can fly with up to 3 grams of cargo and is fairly robust and crash resistant. 

The project is part of the DARPA Hybrid Insect MEMS (HI-MEMS) project, thus future upgrades could include audio/video equipment for insectoid surveillance.

Link to Gizmodo article

Link to Tech-On article

Chemists at MIT have hacked a periwinkle plant to produce anti-cancer and hypertension-fighting drugs. The chemical engineers modified the plant’s existing chemical assembly line, tweaking genes to create chemical components of the medicines. The researchers engineered mutant forms of a gene and inserted them into plant cell cultures, causing the plant to produce chemical compounds it would never produce in nature.

Plants are essentially chemical factories, capable of fusing molecules to form virtually any compound. With enough tweaking, we could coax them to build everything from medicines to fuels to super-strong building materials to revolutionary soda pop. If we can control how plants grow, we can do almost anything.

Link to MIT story