they really are insane - they want to program & control sharks

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/mech-tech/mg18925416.300.html



Stealth sharks to patrol the high seas


IMAGINE getting inside the mind of a shark: swimming silently through the ocean, sensing faint electrical fields, homing in on the trace of a scent, and navigating through the featureless depths for hour after hour.

We may soon be able to do just that via electrical probes in the shark's brain. Engineers funded by the US military have created a neural implant designed to enable a shark's brain signals to be manipulated remotely, controlling the animal's movements, and perhaps even decoding what it is feeling.

That team is among a number of groups around the world that have gained ethical approval to develop implants that can monitor and influence the behaviour of animals, from sharks and tuna to rats and monkeys. These researchers hope such implants will improve our understanding of how the animals interact with their environment, as well as boosting research into tackling human paralysis.

More controversially, the Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails. By remotely guiding the sharks' movements, they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted. The project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), based in Arlington, Virginia, was presented at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, last week.
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if these 4 paragraphs don't make all kinds of connections in your mind .....


somebody better stop the bushmilhousegang

..of course, such things are "woo-woo" and shouldn't be even considered real by "rational", "scientific" people...

they'll want to attach friggen laser beams to their heads!

...controlling the animal's movements...

Espionage, bombs, etc. They were doing something like that with trained dolphins. Now, the animals won't have to be trained. They'll be "guided" missiles.

What a misuse of wildlife.

Imagine how neat it will be when they start using neural implants to program and control us humans.

Over 35% of the U.S. population already has the implants.

Sharks are eating machines, plain and simple. They have survived for thousands of years unchanged and their deeply ingrained instincts cannot be overcome by artificial neural signals. The receptors cannot even be implanted in the sharks, but will be attached to their bodies, thus easily damaged or knocked off. The idea is that the sonar signals to the implants will simulate signals the shark recognizes as coming from a food source. Biologists specializing in the study of sharks have noted that they are very sensitive - even high strung. Their impulse is to seek out food. Given artificial neural signals to this external attachment, trying to control the direction in which this animal swims, versus natural sensory input from an immediately present dead whale or other food source, that is to say, given two impulses running counter to each other, the animal becomes CONFUSED. Then you get "flash behavior". The energy of thwarted instinctive behavior flashes across, as it were, into other channels. The animal then behaves in a way which is not at all motivated by the actual situation.
The Navy plans to attach these receptors to blue sharks and release them off the coast of Florida. Since sharks are often found in groups, imagine that the sonar receptor sending out "food" signals attracts other sharks who will attack the shark that is the source of the food signal. Or , in the stressful confusion of receiving two conflicting impulses, it could stimulate the shark to attack people in the water. For example: (From the book, Great Shark Writings, edited by Valerie and Ron Taylor, 1978, p. 142)

"A further observation by (American biologist, Eugenie) Clark is no less enlightening. On July 27, 1958, not far from her institute, a shark only six feet long bit an eight-year-old boy whose leg had to be amputated immediately. As she discovered, the accident happened at very low tide, in a lagoon in which the shark had obviously become trapped. When the low tide came, it could not get back across the bank into the sea. This STATE OF CONFUSION (emphasis added)may, she thinks,have been the reason why when it say the boy's light-colored legs in the cloudy water it swam in biting."

I'm sure some scientists wrote up a very detailed, complex research/grant proposal to get a big fat grant for this project. It will pay their salaries for several years, but with no chance of practical applications. The last I read they were able to get a little dogfish to turn right or left in a tank by electrical signals that wouldn't even travel through water, so the fish had to be in shallow water with an antenna attached to it and sticking up above the surface! It has been said, and I tend to agree, that divers who work in the areas of the ocean where sharks are prevalent, learn far more about these creatures in a few months than the most industrious scientist who never sets foot in the water could ever learn on land.

I bet right now, Mike Myers is wetting his pants laughing about this.