Indian developer turns'Cockroach' protests into video game Indian developer turns'Cockroach' protests into video game A 27-year-old Indian developer has created a satirical video game inspired by the Cockroach Party-led protests over alleged electoral list irregularities. Players can take on the role of protesters facing baton charges, tear gas, water cannons and police attempts to stop them. Share Indian developer turns'Cockroach' protests into video game on social media Tibet rocked by 7.0-magnitude earthquake Can Pakistan save the last two of its four captive African elephants?

India's'Cockroach' leaders jailed after entering'banned' protest site India's'Cockroach' leaders jailed after entering'banned' protest site Two leaders of India's Cockroach Janta Party have been jailed for five days after entering Delhi's'Jantar Mantar' protest site to demand the election chief's resignation. The previously designated protest area recently lost its status as an authorised protest venue. Share India's'Cockroach' leaders jailed after entering'banned' protest site on social media Palestinians say Israel's democracy'is a joke'

The team embedded electrodes into live cockroaches, then outfitted them with cameras and injection devices to deliver medication via remote control. Small robots and drones have increasingly been used to help respond to disasters, reaching locations that are too hard or too dangerous to send humans, such as collapsed buildings . Many of these efforts have been focused on search and rescue. But new research shows how bugs--with their ability to crawl through even narrower gaps in rubbled-- outfitted with electrodes could be used as the next generation of first responders. A research team from the University of Queensland (UQ) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have developed the "Paraborg" to not only help with searching for victims, but also administer first aid.

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Cyborg cockroach fitted with a tiny diving suit can survive underwater for up to three hours, potentially aiding search and rescue teams in flood and earthquake disaster zones.

A cyborg cockroach survived up to three hours underwater with an experimental new oxygen tank. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Close-up of the cyborg insect and the new diving suit, which has tubes that connect to the breathing holes of the insect and contains an oxygen generator at the back. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .

Swarms of cyborg insects controlled remotely via electrical implants can now operate underwater, thanks to tiny diving suits supplying them with oxygen - which could one day enable them to explore Mars. Hirotaka Sato at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues first demonstrated in 2021 that Madagascar hissing cockroaches () could be remotely controlled with electrodes embedded in sensory organs known as cerci. In 2024, they demonstrated that a swarm of 20 of these cyborg insects could coordinate. The aim was to develop biological robots equipped with infrared sensors that could be released in large numbers after natural disasters to search for survivors. Cockroaches represent a ready-made platform for such applications with a working fuel source, efficient locomotion and in-built reflexes to dodge obstacles - capabilities that engineers still struggle to replicate mechanically at such a small scale.

Soft robotics has advanced rapidly, yet its control methods remain fragmented: different morphologies and actuation schemes still require task-specific controllers, hindering theoretical integration and large-scale deployment. A generic control framework is therefore essential, and a key obstacle lies in the persistent use of rigid-body control logic, which relies on precise models and strict low-level execution. Such a paradigm is effective for rigid robots but fails for soft robots, where the ability to tolerate and exploit approximate action representations, i.e., control compliance, is the basis of robustness and adaptability rather than a disturbance to be eliminated. Control should thus shift from suppressing compliance to explicitly exploiting it. Human motor control exemplifies this principle: instead of computing exact dynamics or issuing detailed muscle-level commands, it expresses intention through high-level movement tendencies, while reflexes and biomechanical mechanisms autonomously resolve local details. This architecture enables robustness, flexibility, and cross-task generalization. Motivated by this insight, we propose a generic soft-robot control framework grounded in control compliance and validate it across robots with diverse morphologies and actuation mechanisms. The results demonstrate stable, safe, and cross-platform transferable behavior, indicating that embracing control compliance, rather than resisting it, may provide a widely applicable foundation for unified soft-robot control.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Fairly recently, I started being verbally abusive to large language models. I highly recommend you experiment with doing so yourself. Over the past 30 days, I have called large language models (primarily OpenAI's paid product) the following names, among others that I won't repeat here because my mom might read this: Dipshit, fucknuts, shitstain, dummy, dumbass, dum-dum fucking dumbass dum-dum, numbnuts, hockey puck (thank you, Don Rickles), turdburger, lickspittle, cockroach, fucking cockroach (thank you, Tony Montana), idiot, fucking idiot, total fucking idiot, and fucking numbnuts dipshit. Ethan Mollick, author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI, and currently the reigning A.I. whisperer for the consultant class, says that anthropomorphizing A.I. is "a sin of necessity."

A robotic arm that can automatically turn cockroaches into controllable cyborgs could be used to create swarms of biological robots for search missions. Hirotaka Sato at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues have previously shown that groups of up to 20 Madagascar hissing cockroaches (Gromphadorhina portentosa) equipped with electronic backpacks can be steered across desert-like terrain. However, to be used in a real-world search-and-rescue mission, the team calculates that hundreds or thousands of cyborg insects would be needed.