Peter Sinclair: Tough year for animals

By PETER SINCLAIR

Thanks to us, 2000 was a rotten year for the rest of the animal kingdom. We made life hell for almost every other species.

Back in March, the Dutch dealt to the amphibians in a series of pioneering anti-gravity experiments, making frogs float in mid-air by distorting the orbits of electrons in the poor creatures' atoms with huge magnetic fields (includes streaming video of actual flying frog).

This cutting-edge study carried off the Physics prize in the IgNobel Awards for "research which cannot or should not be reproduced."

Even the humble bacterium did not escape our attention.

Researchers at Michigan State University turned E. coli into a small but effective biofuel cell delivering up to 17 milliamps by doing what it does best: gorging itself. At the same time, over at the University of South Florida, relays of the tiny things — unresting, unsleeping, all chomping away at our behest — powered Chew the Gastrobot, the first robot to be fuelled by "food" (in the broadest sense of that term).

They think he'll be handy next time we go to Mars — there's a wild gleam in somebody's eye involving the spacecraft's septic-tank as a bacterium buffet.

Further up the evolutionary tree, European Patent #348487398 went to a bunch of mad Brit scientists for inserting human DNA into a pig's ovum, producing something "97 per cent human, 3 per cent pig." A more cynical columnist than the Sleuth might conclude that, on the evidence available from British television, this breakthrough was achieved years ago.

But we reserved our most Moreauvian efforts for fellow-primates.

Scientists from Duke University implanted electrodes in areas of a monkey's brain known to be responsible for movement, and recorded the animal's brainwaves when, for example, it grabbed a banana.

They fed these into a computer connected to a robot arm 965km away in a "Touch Lab" at MIT, and every time the monkey did something, the computer's virtual arm scratched its virtual self.

Mars again. If bananas are flourishing there, we will be able to grab some without leaving Michigan.

It's the beginning of a trend. Already, with ghoulish ingenuity, researchers at Chicago's Northwestern University have succeeded in grafting the brainstem of a sea-lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) into an off-the-shelf Khepera robot, which now responds to stimuli in the way a lamprey would.

Readers who know anything at all about the unappealing habits of this parasitic fish will realise this is not a bot you'd want to be stuck in a lift with. Henry 1st died of a surfeit of the things — people go on about our modern diet, but you never hear of anyone dying from a surfeit of takeaways.

Friendlier is a new class of mechanical mutt which appeared online this Christmas — Sony's no-mess Aibo or Rocket the Wonder Dog, a red-nosed beagle which scratches imaginary fleas and cringes when yelled at.

As Chew, guided by his crew of starving bacteria, lurches through the bleak Martian landscape in search of anything, other than effluent to eat, he will surely wish he was cute enough to be on a shelf at Toys'R'Us.

Links:

Dutch anti-gravity experiments

IgNobel Awards

Michigan State University

University of South Florida

European Patent #348487398

Duke University

MIT

Northwestern University

Khepera robot

Lampreys

Lamprey: A taste treat from prehistory

Aibo

Rocket the Wonder Dog


E-mail: petersinclair@email.com