Researchers One Step Closer to Bomb-Sniffing Cyborg Locusts
Brandie Jefferson, Washington University in St. Louis / August 14, 2020 / Phys.org

If you want to enhance a locust to be used as a bomb-sniffing bug, there are a few technical challenges that need solving before sending it into the field.

I would have said “Duh!” and ended it right there, but there’s more:

Previous work in Raman’s lab led to the discovery that the locust olfactory system could be decoded as an ‘or-of-ands’ logical operation. This allowed researchers to determine what a locust was smelling in different contexts.

Explosive vapors were injected via a hole into a box where the locust sat in a tiny vehicle.

Stop it! You’re killing me!

As the locust was driven around and sniffed different concentrations of vapors, researchers studied its odor-related brain activity.

Wait — who was doing the driving? You kind of glossed over that…

With this knowledge, the researchers were able to look for similar patterns when they exposed locusts to vapors from TNT, DNT, RDX, PETN and ammonium nitrate—a chemically diverse set of explosives. “Most surprisingly,” Raman said, “we could clearly see the neurons responded differently to TNT and DNT, as well as these other explosive chemical vapors.”

OK, that sounds sciencey.

Now they knew that the locusts could detect and discriminate between different explosives, but in order to seek out a bomb, a locust would have to know from which direction the odor emanated.

Enter the “odor box and locust mobile.“

{Catches breath}

I’d love to see the specs for that.

(Good name for a band, though.)

“You know when you’re close to the coffee shop, the coffee smell is stronger, and when you’re farther away, you smell it less? That’s what we were looking at,” Raman said. The explosive vapors were injected via a hole in the box where the locust sat in a tiny vehicle.

Will you please stop saying that??

As the locust was driven around and sniffed different concentrations of vapors, researchers studied its odor-related brain activity.

The signals in the bugs’ brains reflected those differences in vapor concentration.

And, thankfully, they end on a sane note:

The idea isn’t as strange as it might first sound, Raman said.

That’s using the ol’ noodle…

“This is not that different from in the old days, when coal miners used canaries,” he said. “People use pigs for finding truffles. It’s a similar approach—using a biological organism—this is just a bit more sophisticated.”

But they’ll just never live down those locust vehicles.