Cyborg cicadas play Pachelbel's Canon
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This is hard to believe. They stabbed them with electrodes, surely that does some harm.
We don't know that. They're capable of detecting and avoiding harmful stimuli, but that doesn't mean they have the subjective experience of pain.
This research also seems quite tame compared to the trillions or quadrillions of insects we torture to death using pesticides when growing our food or protecting our homes.
This reminds me of "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace. I remember being pretty convinced by his argument that lobsters do indeed feel pain when boiled alive, which was interesting because, as I recall, he argued with simple logic rather than using any biological basis. It may have been as simple as avoiding harm = experiencing pain. I suppose this does not necessarily follow. I'll have to read it again some time.
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.
> with the idea that cyborg cicadas might one day be used to transmit warning messages during emergencies
Papers are just there to get tenure and graduate.
Most of academia isn't after real science anymore.
In other words, if you see insects with electrodes that are moving towards you: RUN!
> The experiments did not harm the cicadas, co-author Naoto Nishida, now at the University of Tokyo, told New Scientist. "Some of them wanted to run away," he said. "Others were like, 'OK, use my abdomen.'"