Who doesn’t love to see roaches crawl around everywhere? Nobody, nobody likes roaches! A Kickstarter campaign, which already exceeded their goal of $10k, developed a kit for you to control a live roach through a Bluetooth power chip and a kit to perform surgery on a roach and the project is called Roboroach. If you can let aside your fear of roaches, this is actually a leap forward towards biohacking.
The surgery kit doesn’t come with the roach, but it makes you able to perform the surgery by yourself. You might end up killing the roach in the process, but it’s not a big deal, people kill roaches because they are gross and they can contaminate things, Roboroach is a biohacking experiment. Like any normal surgery you need anesthesia first, which is performed by putting the roach in ice water until its nervous system freezes.
After that you’ll have to add a three-lead system to the roaches head and connect the tiny wires from the roach’s antennae to its wing muscles. After biohacking the roach you can easily control its movements with your smartphone.
However if the surgery is successful, the roach won’t feel anything, if people are wondering about ethics and the effect won’t last forever, it will fade off in a manner of minutes and the roach will ignore the signal and you can let the roach to be free again.
Although, it looks like a disgusting experiment, it is a very big step for biohacking, as a living being can be controlled by using electrical signals. For now the effects don’t last long, but future discoveries might extend the time limit.
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