New Scientist reports that researchers are developing the means to remotely control living sharks.
Engineers funded by the US military have created a neural implant designed to enable a shark’s brain signals to be manipulated remotely, controlling the animal’s movements, and perhaps even decoding what it is feeling.
The sharks would be used for sensing and tracking, and experiments with the animals may soon take place off the coast of Florida. The technology is different, but I am still reminded of the movie Deep Blue Sea, in which sharks are bioengineered for larger brains. They end up so hyperintelligent—or at least aesthetically sensitive—that they know to eat the cast of the film in reverse order of attractiveness.
Paying attention to context rather than detail, I thought the movie coming out on March 3rd was called “Ultraviolent”. Not quite. The promo material says that Ultraviolet is a
futuristic sci-fi adventure in which a new disease genetically modifies nearly an entire race of people, leaving them with enhanced speed, intelligence, and strength that makes them resemble vampires. Fear among uninfected humans leads to worldwide persecution, bringing the planet to the brink of war between the two “races.”
I take the mention of vampires as a bad sign. And we’ve seen this plot before: it sounds a lot like a combination of X-Men with Kill Bill. But, hey, it could turn out fine.
Those anxiously awaiting their own micro-triceratops would have been disappointed by last night’s NOVA about fossils preserved in amber.
While animals more than 100 million years old have been preserved in amber, it is not clear that extremely old DNA has ever been successfully extracted from this source. Worse, for those with Jurassic Park dreams, a scientist asserts that getting a complete genome from amber is “absolutely impossible,” as preserved DNA is highly fragmented.
However, the show did not examine what could be learned from fragmented DNA, or whether future techniques might enable information to be gleaned from it.