On the next ep of mattsplained there’s an unsettling story about cyborg cockroaches. Early in September researchers from Riken University in Tokyo published a paper detailing their success in creating cyborg cockroaches. They created a solar powered harness that they could use to remotely stimulate the roaches and effectively steer them. The media response has included a certain amount of revulsion, and it’s the kind of story that’s designed to create
As we joke on the show, the only place most people want cockroaches to go is away. But wouldn’t it be cool if you had a laser mounted weapon in your home that would automatically zap mosquitoes, roaches and other bugs? It’s not an especially novel idea: over a decade ago researchers were using the lasers from CD and DVD players to target creepy crawlies, but they rarely went beyond proof of concept prototypes.
Now you can build your own if you have the risk appetite. As reported in Vice, Ildar Rakhmatulin, a researcher at Scotland’s Heriot-Watt Univeristy has built a turret mounted laser roach killer and published the instructions on GitHub. It even has Star Trek phaser-style settings ranging from stun through to not-getting-up-from-that and works at a range of up to 1.2m.
The device is a follow up to an earlier model used to zap mozzies, which was powered by a Raspberry Pi. In the new turret gun he uses a more advanced processor that can run machine learning algoithms, and uses twin cameras to target the roaches position with more accuracy.
As Ildar is keen to point out, building and testing your own version of this living room cannon is very much at your own risk. Even low-powered lasers like pointing devices can cause damage to vision if shined into the eyes of a pet or person. And don’t even think about swapping the laser out for something with a bit more heft. The last thing you want to do is sizzle a creepie crawlie and burn a hole through the wall into next door’s house.
D/L
Thanks to the sloth of this writer, this particular episode of mattsplained didn’t get the push it deserved. Many of us live in fear of the notifications on our phones that pour in from co-workers, friends and family members in what seems to be a never-ending cacophony of pings. Didn’t think anything could be worse than the BlackBerry? If you’re one of those people who spends more time managing Slack than working, this ep might give you some hope.
DIVE IN
I’ve been playing around with the incredible text to image generator MidJourney for the past few weeks. If you hadn’t guessed, it created the image at the top of the page. It’s still very much a beta. It takes quite a lot of patience and attempts to get the kind of results you want. And a whole subculture has been spawned with tutorials and tips to get the outputs you want from your text. You can even use it to create comic books. The results aren’t always perfect, and humans and animals are often noticeably off. Missing eyes or with malformed limbs. But it’s still amazing.
It’s addictive. The free trial allows you to create 25 images, which you’ll probably use up in less than an hour, leaving you pondering whether to take up one of the paid plans that start at USD10 a month. At the moment, it operates through Discord, so if you aren’t familiar with the system there’s a bit of a learning curve, though nothing that can’t be fixed with MindJourney’s really comprehensive getting started notes.
I’ll leave you with this extremely random selction of images I’ve been playing around with.