Beetle, Meet Mind Control.

UC Berkeley engineers, funded by the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have created mindless insect drones at our command! The Berkeley team implanted electrods into the beetle's brain and muscles, and with electric pulses, can stimulate the beetle's wings to launch, fly left or right, and land from a distance away Remote-control insects! Watch this video:

At last!! My dream of driving a insect swarm around the city and terrorizing my enemies can finally come truuue!! But it looks like someone beat me to the punch on Christmas Island.

What, you really think it's a natural "crab migration"?

(Via New Science)

Shohrt & Sweet Feature: Regrowing our Fingers with Pig Bladder Dust!

We all know about the mad science going on about growing body parts. If salamanders can regenerate their limbs, deer their antlers and mice their hearts, then why can't people regenerate a lost limb too? Turns out it’s not only possible, it’s actually happening in laboratories today! In this Short & Sweet feature, someone regrew a severed finger just by sprinkling pig bladder powder on it within 4 weeks! It’s only a matter of time before they are able to grow an actual human heart (and other unmentionables).

When a hobby-store owner in Cincinnati sliced off his fingertip in 2005 while showing a customer why the motor on his model plane was dangerous, he went to the emergency room without the missing tip. He couldn't find it anywhere. The doctor bandaged the wound and recommended a skin graft to cover the top of his right-middle stub for cosmetic purposes, since nothing could be done to rebuild the finger. Months later, he had regrown it, tissue, nerves, skin, fingernail and all.
This particular hobbyist happened to have a brother in the tissue-regeneration business, who told him to forego the skin graft and instead apply a powdered extract taken from pig's bladder to the raw finger tip. The extract, called extracellular matrix, is like a cellular scaffolding, and all animals have it. It tells the cells to divide, differentiate and build themselves into a that scaffolding. Cake it on the finger, add in a sprinkle of time, Viola! A new finger!

Check out this CBS News story about growing organs — apparently a lab at Wake Forest University has grown an entire beating sheep’s heart.