US military step closer to using cyborg moths as spies

FORGET Predator drones: the future of military reconnaissance appears to be the insect cyborg, after scientists successfully fitted moths with an electrical system that allowed the hapless beasts to be remotely controlled.

The research is part of a programme run by shadowy US military defence agency Darpa which has been developing machine-insect interfaces for years, New Scientist reports.

The remote controlled cyborg moth was created by a team at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). They developed a tiny probe which they wired up to the central nervous system of Manduca sexta, the tobacco hawkmoth.

The control circuit, which weighs less than half a gram, is carried inside the moth's abdomen and includes a battery pack and wireless transmitter which the giant moth, with a wingspan the width of a human hand, is easily able to carry.

When the scientists stimulated one side of the moth's abdomen with electrical pulses, the insect flew one way, and vice versa. Even the sharpness of the turn could be controlled by adjusting the strength of the electrical current. Their findings are reported in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods.

Insect neurobiologist Roy Ritzmann of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio told New Scientist the MIT study is a "major advance", but said we are still a long way from an actual insect cyborg.

"To really get to a cyborg, we would need to tap where behavioural commands come from and often that is the brain," he explained. "We are just starting to understand these brain circuits."

Darpa is hoping to put remote-controlled moths to nefarious tasks on the battlefield - presumably against enemies who do not use bright lightbulbs - but Joel Voldman, of the MIT team, believes his findings might one day help stroke victims to regain mobility. "It turns out there are a bunch of cylindrical nerves in humans that are about the same size [as in the moth]," he says. ·