Washington DC: Pests like locusts are not usually on most people’s minds when seeking an alternative to bomb-sniffing dogs.
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However, a team of scientists from Washington University in St. Louis has managed to program these annoying bugs to sniff out a variety of smells, including that of explosives, reported Fox News.
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A preprint research paper that appeared on the BioRxiv website claimed that cyborg locusts were used to sense gases emitted by explosive substances such as ammonium nitrate, TNT and RDX.
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The scientists plugged the insects’ brains with electrodes to record their neural activity while they were introduced to different chemical substances.
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The brains of these machine-strapped insects formed distinct activity patterns just after 500 milliseconds of exposure to five different types of explosive substances.
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Locusts’ antennae come equipped with almost 50,000 olfactory neurons. Also, their strength and sturdiness allows them to carry heavy payload loads attached to their bodies
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Lead researcher Baranidharan Raman, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University at St. Louis stated in a release on the university’s website that “we expect this work to develop and demonstrate a proof-of-concept, hybrid locust-based, chemical-sensing approach for explosive detection.”
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The project was allocated a sum of 750,000 dollars in the year 2016 by the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
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