Cyborg cicadas play Pachelbel's Canon
6 comments
·May 3, 2025k310
Aw, get a tiny piezo speaker instead. We don't use frog's legs as activators any more, since Galvani.
mystraline
Yuck.
Torturing insects to make worse-than-MIDI music is gross.
Like, I dunno, record lots of cicada sounds and SIMULATE it?
These researchers should be ashamed of themselves. And it wasn't other-life-saving reasons, but shitty music.
debugnik
They do claim to have a better motive, but it's a fairly weak one:
> with the idea that cyborg cicadas might one day be used to transmit warning messages during emergencies
msla
I've lived somewhere with cicadas. If their drone begins to tell me things, I'm checking into a mental hospital for a schizophrenia workup and/or so the massive bug monster doesn't eat me.
bitwize
Horrors beyond human comprehension, got it. We know that arthropods can meaningfully feel pain. Turning living insects into a biological Floppotron is some Dr. Moreau shit that will earn you, at best, an IgNobel -- and I'm not even sure the IgNobel committee would want to draw positive attention to this kind of work. That said, I'm sure that The Fifth Element style spy cockroaches will start appearing in homes and offices courtesy your local intelligence agency before the decade is out.
[delayed]