INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The distinctive chirps of singing cicadas are a highlight of summer in regions where they proliferate; those chirps even featured
prominently on Lorde's 2021 album Solar Power
Now, Japanese scientists at the University of Tsukuba have figured out how to transform cicadas into cyborg insects capable of "playing"
They described their work in a preprint published on the physics arXiv
You can listen to the sounds here.Scientists have been intrigued by the potential of cyborg insects since the 1990s, when researchers began
implanting tiny electrodes into cockroach antennae and shocking them to direct their movements
The idea was to use them as hybrid robots for search-and-rescue applications.For instance, in 2015, Texas A&M scientists found that
implanting electrodes into a cockroach's ganglion (the neuron cluster that controls its front legs) was remarkably effective at successfully
steering the roaches 60 percent of the time
They outfitted the roaches with tiny backpacks synced with a remote controller and administered shocks to disrupt the insect's balance,
forcing it to move in the desired directionAnd in 2021, scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore turned Madagascar
hissing cockroaches into cyborgs, implanting electrodes in sensory organs known as cerci that were then connected to tiny computers
Applying electrical current enabled them to steer the cockroaches successfully 94 percent of the time in simulated disaster scenes in the
lab.The authors of this latest paper were inspired by that 2021 project and decided to apply the basic concept to singing cicadas, with the
idea that cyborg cicadas might one day be used to transmit warning messages during emergencies
It's usually the males who do the singing, and each species has a unique song
In most species, the production of sound occurs via a pair of membrane structures called tymbals, which are just below each side of the
insect's anterior abdominal region
The tymbal muscles contract and cause the plates to vibrate while the abdomen acts as a kind of resonating chamber to amplify the song.
