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Juan Leguizamon

Building your very own cockroach cyborgs.

BY TIMOTHY MARZULLO, PH.D., AND GREGORY GAGE, PH.D.

You wake up with a desire to do some neural engineering. You open up your insect terrarium, bring out your pet flower beetle, your tobacco moth, or your cockroach, and turn on a switch on the insect’s back. With your remote control, you begin steering your insect around the room.

image While this may sound like science fiction, remote controlled insects have been around for 15 years. Starting in the late 1990s, two groups of researchers (at the ...

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