Military Cyborg Menagerie

The cyborg flying rats are nasty, sure. But China isn't the only country looking to bend animals to their will. And pigeons aren't the only critters being controlled.

* A 1994 Air Force proposal called for the use of "sex attractant chemicals for bugs" as weapons. A
"'sting/attack me' chemical that causes bees to attack" could be "especially effective for infiltration routes," the document noted. It also pondered the use of "strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior."

* A Darpa project equipped rats "with radios that transmit their brainwaves." The ultimate goal: help locate disaster survivors.

* Another Agency-funded researcher used squid juice to steer sharks this way and that. Maybe one day the killers of the deep can become "stealth spies" for the military.

* And, although there are no electrodes involved, let's not forget about the honeybees trained for bomb-detection, the chickens used as early-warning sensors for chemical attacks, the sea lions fighting terrorist swimmers, the dolphins hunting mines, or the dogs on crowd-control duty.

Darpa, in particular, is interested in harnessing the power of the wild kingdom, as part of their larger push into biology. "We wanted to learn the capabilities of nature, before others taught them to us," Michael Goldblatt, the former head of Darpa's Defense Sciences Office, told me for my story in the new issue of* Wired*. Which not only brings us to steerable rats -- it leads to robots that look like dogs, monkeys controlling robotic limbs, and, maybe, planes that bend like plants, too.

There's still one, way-out investigation into the natural world that Goldblatt wishes he could've tried. "The one program I always wanted to do, but could never get a project manager for, was to figure out how dogs sense epileptic events long before they happen."

ALSO:

* Cyborg Pigeons Revealed!

* Cyborg Flying Rats Invade China