https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49k0l2fsig
The squeak of the cicada, the sound of many summers, has received an electronic update that turns insects into cyborg speakers that play anything, from the Pachelbel canon to the theme Gun. Researchers behind work say it could be used to spread warning messages duration of an emergency.
Naoto Nishida and his colleagues from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, were inspired by previous research in which the cockroaches were controlled remote by electrodes that triggered the muscle movement. Nishida says that while sitting on his forest campus and listening to the chirriad cicadas nearby, the researchers decided to “borrow their squeak” using a similar approach.
Cycades make noise with organans called timbals that have thick ribs linked by thin membranes that, when flexing, create a click. Doing this hundreds of times a second creates a continuous noise, with the tone determined by the frequency of the flexions.
To take control of the timbals, the researchers implemented electrodes in seven great brown cicadas (Jungla ttopsaltria nigrofuscata) And used signals from a computer through an amplifier to induce noise in controlled fields with precision.
The team was able to induce cicadas to play music with precision, with insects capable of playing tones in more than three octaves, from a musical note to 27.5 Hertz to a C to 261.6 Hertz.
Nishida, who is now at the University of Tokyo, says that animals were relatively unharmed by experiments and some were released again in nature. “Some of them wanted to flee,” he says. “Some of them were like ‘Ok, use my abdomen’.”
The team states in its article that Cyborg insects could be used in emergency situations such as earthquakes, where they could be more efficient, durable and agile robots of Thanic.
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