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A dead sparrow brought back to life by robotics scientists has been having a terrible time getting beaten up by its living relatives. They attack it. They fear it. But that was all part of the experiment.
Students at North Carolina’s Duke University teamed up with a local taxidermist to re-animate the wings of a dead sparrow, sticking a small motor inside the poor dead bird’s body cavity to move the poor little thing’s limbs about. The idea behind it was to see how much wing-flapping is used as an aggressive act by the birds, monitoring the responses of real birds to the various movements of the Frankensparrow.
The robot bird survived two months of wing-flapping experiments and being attacked by other males on a daily basis, before “the head fell off and the wing stopped moving.” [BBC]
Image credit: Sparrow from Shutterstock
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Robo-Tea
“head fell off” reminds me of this….
http://www.anyclip.com/movies/dumb-dumber/selling-a-dead-bird-to-a-blind-boy/
This is why sparrows will survive the zombie apocalypse.
And the robot uprising
I suggest to further this experiment we kill and stuff one of the Students at North Carolina’s Duke University, arrange it’s hand in the “flipping the bird” gesture and see how much bird-flipping is seen as an aggressive act.
The Robo-Sparrow was created by Man
It was Shunned and Bullied
It Evolved
There are many Copies
And they have a Plan…
Dark. Really dark.
Anyone see that Penguin nature documentary on BBC one? They had a bunch of robot penguins with cameras in to stalk real penguins. One even had its head pecked off.