New project aims to upload a honey bee's brain into a flying insectobot by 2015 - 0 views
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Daniel Carriere on 03 Oct 12The "Green Brain Project" aims to create an insectobot (a robotic insect) with the brain of a honey bee. It's not as crazy or difficult as it sounds though, the researchers working on this project are not directly copying a bees brain but trying to recreate it. More specifically they are recreating bees two most important senses- sight and smell. They will then upload this fake brain into a small insect like robot so it can act somewhat like a real honey bee. This is important, as it would be a huge step forward in robotics and also because scientists say they could use robotic bees to artificially pollinate. This could help with the reduced number of honeybees. Bees are very important to the whole environment so this project could possibly be revolutionary. I chose the tag "environment" because scientist are trying to recreate a natural animal that not only comes from Earth but greatly impacts it. Plants need bees pollination to grow, and animals need plants to eat so with a lack of bees, the whole food web would take a major hit. This project aims to try to fix this. To me, it seems like it would be extremely expensive and difficult to create as many bees as the earth would need. Maybe in the distant future though, this may be realized.