Sitting amid the blackened remains of his home, 32-year-old Nikesh Gawali carefully broke open a half-melted plastic box with a screwdriver. His hands shook slightly, not out of fear, but out of hope. “I’m trying to find my daughter Aarti’s gold earrings,” he said quietly, still focused on the box. “She’s just five. I got them made recently after months of labour work.” The plastic box, warped and blackened by heat, was one of the few things left from his two-room house on the outskirts of Dhamangaon village . All around him lay ash, broken tin sheets and charred wooden beams. The walls had cracked under the heat and the front room’s tin roof had caved in completely. What remained was a blackened debris all around - almost nothing to suggest a home once stood there. Nikesh earns his living as an agricultural labourer, like many in the village. Work is uncertain and depends on the season. Those earrings weren’t just jewellery - they were a small dream, a reward for his hard work,...
A rat with a mounted camera on his head would help Indian armed forces in Intelligence Surveillance and Recovery (ISR) operation by entering the enemy territory soon. Scientists of DRDO’s Young Scientist Laboratory (DYSL-AT) created intelligence-augmented rat cyborgs controlled via a wireless micro-stimulator. The Rat cyborgs are undergoing Phase-I trials at DRDOs’ laboratory, informed P Shiva Prasad, Director of DYSL-AT on Thursday.
P Shiva Prasad told mediapersons after the plenary session that the rat would be maneuried with electronic commands through semi-invasive brain electrodes. “This is the first time India has engaged in developing such technology,” he said, adding that some foreign countries already have the technology.
In Phase-I, the operator always gives commands for all the turns and the rite will go accordingly. In Phase-II, the scientist can actually feed an image to the camera. When the rat finds the image in the camera it will stay there. He gave an example of the 26/11 terrorist attack in which the army personnel were searching the 200 rooms of the Taj hotel. In such a scenario, the rat cyborgs would be helpful to the forces in search operation, he claimed.
Shiva Prasad further said, “Remote controlled robots can not climb the wall and some configurations are very bulky and they can not be sent through very narrowed pipes. Endurance will be the most important point in choosing the rat. The rat can go to the kitchen, eat food and resume the mission.”
When asked why only rats were chosen for the mission, he replied that the pleasure points which need to be rewarded to the rats through electrical pulses are very clear in the literature. So it is very easy to start with it. The electrical pulses are minute which actually brings some kind of excitement to them.
In Phase -I, the electrodes need to be implanted in the brain of the rats. “We are going for wireless transmission to the brain in Phase - II, so that same activity of exiting their neurons would happen through wireless transmission,” he stated, adding that three to four rats were used for lab leve prototype so far.
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