Remote-Controlled Cows

Ed Grabianowski — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:00:00 PDT

If you have a pet dog or cat, chances are your furry pal has an embedded microchip that allows animal shelters to find out who the owner is in the event of an escape or pet-napping. Imagine if that same chip could tell a dog to go home or relay instructions directly from the owner, even if the dog was miles away. That's the sort of technology being pursued by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service, which can remotely direct cows and even calm them down.

In the USDA experiment, cows equipped with special ear receivers (like iPods for cows) receive signals from a remote controlling station. By giving them irritating stimuli, such as unpleasant sounds, they can direct the cows to move in a certain direction. They can even play them traditional "gathering songs" used by cowboys to group the herd. Based on invisible fence technology used by ranchers, the devices were upgraded by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to include GPS and a full suite of animal diagnostics. That could make it very easy to track and return a lost pet, and it could be a huge boon to biologists who track and study wildlife. Image by: Flikr.

A Futuristic Linkage of Animals and Electronics. [U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service]

Grohl: I Hate Wolverine More Than I Hate Courtney Love

Graeme McMillan — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 08:00:42 PST

Dave Grohl isn't just the leader of bubblegum grunge group Foo Fighters; he's also the latest enemy of the Uncanny X-Men. When a trailer for the upcoming Wolverine and the X-Men cartoon appeared online earlier this week, fans noted the use of music by Sevendust and Foo Fighters as happy proof that something, finally, had replaced the embarrassing hair metal of the '90s cartoon series. Little did they know that that replacement wasn't going to last too long.

Well, the problem with using something like "Best of You" by Foo Fighters for your trailer is that you generally have to pay for its use. Otherwise, you may have to pull the trailer from your official promotional site for the series when the band notices, and YouTube pages where the trailer was will disappear one by one, replaced by messages reading "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by The Foo Fighters."

Does this mean that Grohl would rather get paid for his work than allow the kids to see their favorite superheroic mutants fight crime, or are his motives much more altruistic? Considering the trailer shows Professor Xavier get blown up as a cheap motivation for his former students to become depressed and out for revenge, perhaps he's simply saving the audience from another lame attempt at grim and gritty superheroes, straight from the late 1980s.

io9: foo fighters

Remote-Controlled Cows

Grohl: I Hate Wolverine More Than I Hate Courtney Love