EMPTY ALL CAGES

Sources: Guardian, io9.com, gizmag.com, NBC News, U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), Wikipedia, LiveScience.com

Editor’s Note:  This NOT a typical science/tech article, nor does it belong under non-animal research alternatives. What we have here shows the continuing heartless and sadistic sociopathy of humans. Vivisection. Not just vivisection, but “neuroscience for everyone” from the US military and Backyard Brains. It seems we cannot leave even the smallest forms of life alone, to live as they would chose, without being put through some kind of vicious tests based on twisted curiosity. It’s been a fact since 2009 that all beings feel pain and stress.  In fact, it would be hard to argue that in order for any species to survive and evolve, they must feel pain in order to learn how to avoid danger- just as these poor insects undoubtedly do.  ARAs say it all the time- sometimes I’m ashamed to be human.

In 2006, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) asked America’s scientists to submit “innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs.” A Darpa programme manager and Cornell engineer, wrote in a pamphlet the agency issued to the prospective researchers: Perhaps the military didn’t need to start from scratch; if they began with live insects, they’d already be halfway to their dream flying machines. All they’d have to do was figure out how to hack into insects’ bodies and control their movements.

It makes sense to pattern robots after insects— after all, they must be doing something right, seeing as they are the most successful animals on the planet, comprising roughly 75 percent of all animal species known to humanity. Indeed, scientists have patterned robots after insects and other animals for decades — to mimic cockroach wall-crawling, for instance, or the grasshopper’s leap.

But we have high tech ways to study this, right now, so that we don’t have to hurt anyone to make progress. Scientists know this and still they insist on putting a living being in agony. Apparently they’ve been doing it for a while, completely ignoring more accurate learning options.

“We’ve been spending the last 20 years or so looking at cockroaches trying to get around barriers and recording what’s going on,” says biologist Roy Ritzmann at Case Western University, “Finding     out how a cockroach’s nervous system directs its motion tells researchers where to implant electrodes that would control the insect’s movement. Robots could traverse a disaster site a lot more ffectively if they’re programmed to think and move like cockroaches.” So why do insects make such great candidates to become cyborgs in the first place? For one thing, they can move with a system of locomotion that’s as sophisticated as that of most mammals. Also, insects have open circulatory systems, and they recover quickly after surgery. But most of all, their locomotive and navigational abilities make them excellent cyborgs — and great templates for us to learn more about locomotion and flight in general.”

Typically, sadistic vivisecters lie about what they do and how it necessary, but that statement is especially stupid…In the 21^st century we need to learn about navigation and flight?? The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has to date (2012) invested $12 million into research since it began in 2006. It currently supports these cybug projects:

• Roaches at Texas A&M.
• Hornet beetles at the University of  Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley.
• Moths at an MIT-led team and another moth project at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research.

Darpa and scientists knew that insects were living feeling beings before the general public did and yet they continued to brutalize 1000s of them over the years:

“People have the idea that insects are simple creatures, but Ritzmann says that’s just not true. “It’s not that insects are simple automatons that we can learn first and then apply to bigger animals.” If anything, insects are just as complex and versatile as larger creatures.”

This video shoes the complete procedure of taking a wild life form and turning it into a remote controlled slave.

Vivisectors Shamelessly Admit to Mind Control and Inflicting Pain

“A lot of people have been implanting probes near the muscles controlling the abdomen,” Ritzmann says. “If you could tap into the areas of the brain where the animal is making the command determining where it’s going to go, you could do this a lot more subtly.” Of course, this type of mind control would first require knowledge of how the brain sends these commands.

But one researcher is already exerting a different type of mind control over insects. At the University of Oxford, neuroscientist Gero Miesenbock uses genetic engineering, chemicals, and lasers to modify fruit flies’ brains and behavior. After isolating the parts of a fly’s brain responsible for certain behaviors, such as jumping, flying, or broadcasting a mating call, Miesenbock engineered flies in which these brain cells would be sensitive to light. Shining a laser at the flies from a distance was enough to stimulate these behaviors. Miesenbock even managed to make female flies enact a male behavior:  vibrating one wing to “sing” a mating call.

And Miesenbock’s mind control goes deeper than influencing behavior. He has also implanted memories into fruit fly brains. And in the process, he discovered the brain circuit responsible for the flies’ memory information. “In order to make fruit flies avoid a certain odor, you could give them a shock every time they were exposed to that scent. The conditioning works because the insects form memories in which the smell is associated with pain. But Miesenbock bypassed this conditioning — instead implanting memories directly into fruit flies’ brains.”

Backyard Brains: Neuroscience for Everyone

Two mentally ill vivisectors have completely lost their minds and now offer kits to inflict pain and control the minds of innocent beings living in your backyard.

Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo, former researchers, are taking these techniques and making them available to anyone with an internet connection and about £50 to spare. In 2009, Gage and Marzullo established Backyard Brains, a company that sells low-cost kits that will turn any interested amateur into a deranged vivisector.

Their first product was known as the SpikerBox. On sale for $99.99 (£65), the device lets customers observe neural firing in a cockroach in real time. (A set of three roach slaves is $12 extra.) For their
second product, Gage and Marzullo decided to push the boundaries further, to venture beyond brain observation and into brain control. They created a kit that provides their customers with all the tools they need to take over the nervous system of a living cockroach. “In principle, the Backyard Brains RoboRoach is nearly indistinguishable from the beetles being made in a university lab. It means we can all experiment with vivisection in our own homes-kids and adults.”   (adding even more sociopaths to society who will turn into serial killers.)

Owners’ and product details state:

“If you’re new to the hobby of animal mind manipulation, the cockroach is an excellent place to start. Because a roach relies on its long, fluid-filled antennae for a host of sensory and navigational functions, its nervous system is stunningly easy to hack; all a wannabe roachmaster has to do is thread a wire inside each antenna. (“It’s like it’s designed to be a cyborg,” Marzullo says.)

” The wires run out of its antennae and into a small black box Marzullo has glued on to its head. He plugs this “connector” into the cockroach backpack, a red-and-green assemblage of circuit boards. The electronics are slightly modified versions of circuit boards that come from a widely available toy: a plastic, remote-controlled inchworm called the HexBug that retails for about £7.50 at toy stores. When these circuit boards are linked to the head-mounted connector, Marzullo and Gage can use the remote control that comes with the toy to deliver pulses of electricity to the roach. “The world’s first commercially available cyborg,” Marzullo says.”

Gage and Marzullo attract controversy because they are taking biotechnology out of the lab and putting it into the hands of the public. And they are criticised for meddling with animal bodies for “trivial” purposes.

“Most people, Marzullo explains, have accepted the use of animals for scientific research, military defence or food. “But if you exploit animals for education,” he says, “people aren’t cool with that.” Is educating students about the nervous system – and potentially encouraging a new generation of neuroscientists – a less-justifiable use of animals than hunting out mines or earthquake survivors? It’s time to start thinking through these issues, because now that the tools of brain control have been liberated from the lab, there’s no telling how they’ll be used.”

“Backyard Brains is tapping into this movement, giving amateurs access to some of science’s most sophisticated tools and techniques. The latest, greatest cyborg critters may come not from state-of-the-art labs, but the minds of curious kids and individual hobbyists. Though scientists will continue to build their cyborg animals, Marzullo says he fully expects that “kids will be able to hack these things, like they wrote code in the Commodore 64 days”. We are heading towards a world in which anyone with a little time, money and imagination can commandeer an animal’s brain. That’s as good a reason as any to start thinking about where we’d draw our ethical lines. The animal cyborgs are here, and we’ll each have to decide whether we want a turn at the controls.”

We can only pray that these unstable deranged “people” become incapacitated in some way, soon, before they can breed anymore insanity.