The Roboroach Is Either The Best Or Worst Holiday Gift Ever

Let’s say you have a certain someone on your list who is really into biohacking. Let’s also assume you’re Ok with having discoid roaches in the house. Then also let’s assume you don’t mind people operating on those roaches on your dining room table. Have I got a Christmas gift idea for you!

We first talked about the Roboroach back in 2011 when we found the idea to be weird and repellent. Arguably the idea is still weird and repellent but it is also an incredible experiment in neuroscience and a great way to teach STEM to potentially bored kids.

What is the Roboroach? It’s a $99 kit that includes a small Bluetooth-powered chip and a mini surgery. Roaches cost extra but you can get them at a local pet store. They recommend discoid roaches which cannot fly and have a few helpful markers on their bodies to help in the surgery.

Please remember that this is not a toy. You are working on live insects here and whilethe folks who make these, BackyardBrains offers a detailed ethical statement, you have to be OK working and potentially killing a living thing. It’s a hard thing for kids to grasp and it’s also pretty gross if you’re not in the proper mindset.

To “install” it you have to insert a tiny wire lead into the roach’s wing muscle and then snip and connect leads to the roach’s antennae. The first step, however, is to glue a three-lead system to its head carapace. The process is at once precise and very imprecise. If you’re not a born surgeon you are sure to mess things up but the bug is essentially asleep during your ministrations thanks to an ice water bath that occurs after each step. This is not for the squeamish. The insertion of the leads is quite difficult the first time and the snipping of the antennae and insertion of the other two leads is quite scary. Everything is held together with super glue and a low temperature hot glue gun and the insect can survive the procedure and live a happy life after you experiment on it, dying a natural death albeit with a three-pronged lead attached to its head.

Once everything is installed you can simply connect a very small and light electrical stimulator to the bug and start sending signals.

How does it work? Again, you have to treat this like a scientific experiment. The system is not actually a remote control for a roach. It’s more like a signal generator that sends electrical pulses to the roach’s antennae. These pulses then send the roach moving either left or right, depending on the signal. This works only for a brief period and then neuroplasticity kicks in and the roach forgets the signals.

I did this with three kids ages 3, 6, and 9 and all of them were very weirded out but they all had a good time watching and talking about the experiment. Unlike, say, model rocketry this project is quite involved and quite advanced and I could definitely see some solid experiments coming from this kit and it should inspire some biologists of the future.

The Roboroach will either make perfect sense as a gift for someone on your holiday list or it will make no sense at all. Whether or not you want to put roaches under your tree is a judgement call only you can make but rest assured it’s a crazy and crazy fun way to learn about biohacking in a very real way.

Comments

How ad-free subscriptions could solve Facebook

At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with its finances, restricting how far it’s willing to go to protect us from the harms of over use. The advertising-supported model comes with some big benefits, though. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that “We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.” Ads lets Facebook remain free for those who don’t want to pay, and more importantly, for those around the world who couldn’t afford to. Ads pay for Facebook to keep the lights on, research and develop new technologies, and profit handsomely in a way that attracts top talent and further investment. More affluent users with more buying power in markets like the US, UK, and Canada command higher ad prices, effectively...

Anyline Raises €1.5M To Let You Add Optical Character Recognition To Your App

Anyline , the Austrian startup that provides mobile OCR tech to enable developers to add text recognition to their own apps, has raised €1.5 million in funding. The list of investors is interesting, too. It includes angel investor Johann ‘Hansi’ Hansmann, busuu co-founder Bernhard Niesner, Lukas Püspök, and the U.S.-based VC-fund iSeed Ventures. However, most notable is that the round was led by Gernot Langes-Swarovski Group. As one investor put it to me, “the fact that the Swarovski family led the round shows that finally ‘old’ money is moving into Austrian startups”. Offering its own mobile Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology — which uses a smartphone’s camera to accurately scan and recognise any kind of text, code or number — Anyline co-founder and CEO Lukas Kinigadner tells me the startup is built on the premise that “people screw up a lot”. “Mistakes happen easily when you’re writing down a 10-digit-number and then have to type it in again a few moments later...

Windows 7 and 8.1 Update to Windows 10 automatically

Windows 10 downloader While it might be a bit too early to start getting excited over the Windows 10 update , which isn't expected to arrive until summer, Microsoft seems to already be warming up people's computers just the same. A recommended, and therefore purely optional, update for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows 8.1 has been discovered to be laying the groundwork for those machines' eventual upgrade to Windows 10. Although the Windows 10 release date was not announced officially, the details of this update also reveal how Microsoft might try to convince users to update to the latest Windows 10 version. The KB3035583 update "enables additional capabilities for Windows Update notifications when new updates are available to the user", which sounds pretty common. That is, until you dig into the update files and see a certain GWXUXWorker.exe which, upon further inspection, would actually "Download Windows 10". So this rather ...

Three Reasons Why You Need Better Personal Cyber security

From the infamous Sony hack to the recent WannaCry virtual catastrophe that affected over 300,000 computers, the need for reliable personal cyber security has never been more apparent. Rubica's skilled team of experts want to remind every one of the importance of cyber security and the three reasons why it is becoming a more pressing issue every day. With top-notch personal cyber security, most attacks are preventable. 1. Larger Number Of Attacks Americans have heard of the most notable attacks on major corporations or government entities over the past several years. However, most people who are not in the information security field do not learn just how much the attack frequency is growing. The number of cyber attacks carried out worldwide in 2015 was quadruple a number of attacks recorded in 2013. Although the cost associated with the number of annual recorded attacks is in the $500 billion range right now, experts say that it will grow well into the trillions by ...

Insure Your Family by Controlling Devices Through an App

AIR: YOUR SMART HOME Have you ever rushed to your house suspecting that you may have accidently kept the iron turned on? How do you deter a burglar from breaking into your house? You probably would rush to your house and manually turn off the switch in the first instance, and get a burglar alarm for the next. But what if there were a single solution for both? Humans are delegating a lot of menial and repetitive tasks to machines. And as far as errands in your house and offices are concerned, the good news is – you can control appliances through your smart phone. INTRODUCING AIR: YOUR SMART HOME Air app, which is available on both Android and Apple platforms, interacts with your devices and switches them off with a single tap. AIR MOBILE APP The app is complemented with a package that consists of a pentagonal-shaped unit and switchboard module. Once you install air unit; your smartphone can interact with it using the Air App. Thereafter, the unit instructs the...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog