Somewhat unusually, the Daily Cal's Science section has been scooped by Dave Barry As he writes,

I think we all agree that the answer is: Yes. When technology goes too far, ordinary citizens must take action. But the question is: How do we define ''too far?'' I will tell you. We define ''too far'' as ``when scientists start putting weapons on cockroaches.''

This is actually happening, according to an article in the Sept. 6 issue of Science magazine, brought to my attention by alert reader Richard Sweetman. This article states that researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have been ''mounting tiny cannons on the backs of cockroaches.'' That is correct: These researchers have been outfitting live cockroaches with backpacks containing ``plastic tubes filled with explosives.''

Of course the researchers have a scientific reason for doing this: They are on LSD.

No, really, it has something to do with figuring out how cockroaches have such good balance. (You almost never see a cockroach fall off a bicycle.) The researchers have used their findings to construct a working robot roach that is, according to Science, the size of a breadbox. Swell! If there's anything this world needs more than armed cockroaches, it's giant mechanized cockroaches!

NEWSPAPER STORY FROM THE YEAR 2004: ``A homeowner in Santa Rosa, Calif., was found shot to death in his kitchen Friday. Police said the man apparently was felled by 500 rounds of small-bore cannon fire, mostly in his ankles, indicating that this was the work of the gang of armed research cockroaches that escaped from a Berkeley lab. Police said the motive in the slaying was apparently a Ring Ding. In a related development, an escaped robot cockroach broke into an Oakland Wal-Mart and made off with an estimated 17,000 AA batteries.''

Ask yourself: Is that the kind of story you want to read in your newspaper? Me too, as long as it's California.

For those interested, here's the actual article (UCB Student Proxy Server setup required,) and here's a quote from it

They outfitted the beasts with jetpacks, 2.5- cm-long plastic tubes filled with explosives, triggered by electrical wires that delivered 10-millisecond bursts—the length of a single roach stride. They then watched how the bugs recouped when suddenly knocked off balance by the tiny blasts. From videotapes of hundreds of cockroach runs, the researchers found that the roaches “didn’t even break their stride,” says Jindrich.

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