
Japan - Police release a swarm of
robot-moths to sniff out a distant drug stash. Rescue robot-bees dodge through earthquake rubble to find survivors.
These may sound like
science-fiction scenarios, but they are
the visions of Japanese scientists who hope to understand and then rebuild the brains of insects and program them for specific tasks.
Ryohei Kanzaki, a professor at Tokyo University's Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology, has studied insect brains for three decades and become a pioneer in the field of insect-machine hybrids. (
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