“What about this plot for a future Bond film? Terrorists want to bomb the Queen. After some introductory heroics that involve the spy fighting bad guys on the London Eye, Bond returns to headquarters, where Q gives 007 a tiny silver box about the size of a cigarette case. Bond opens it and sees a grasshopper.”
“For me to watch, this plot’s will have to have a little more umpf than that. And a grasshopper in a box isn’t typical of one of those high-tech weapons he usually gets, like an exploding watch or some ink pen that shoots darts.”
“No, but hear me out. So, Bond sees the grasshopper, and he looks quizzically at Q. Q then says, ‘It’s a bomb-sniffing grasshopper, and here’s his leash.’ Bond gives Q one of those looks that says (in an English accent), ‘You’ve gone off the bloody deep end.’ Q then explains that grasshoppers can detect and discriminate among the scents of different bomb materials, specifically among the vapors of TNT, DNT, RDX, PETN, and ammonium nitrate. As the plot unfolds, Bond’s mission is to find an explosive device planted in the basement of Parliament—a remake of the Guy Fawkes story. So, Bond takes the grasshopper and his Beretta and speeds over to the government building in his Aston Martin. There Bond and the grasshopper fight noseblind terrorists and find and disarm the bomb just in time to save the Queen during her annual visit.”
“Whoa. Grasshopper? Smelling explosives like some airport security dog? Does Bond give it a name? How about hoppy? Too rabbit-like? Where did you get this ridiculous idea? Sounds as though you’ve gone loco on locusts. Have you been eating swainsonine in your salads?”
“No, there’s some serious science in this. Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis studied the smelling ability of Schistocerca americana, the American grasshopper. They found the bug could detect the vapor of an explosive in 500 milliseconds.* So, the idea isn’t so farfetched as you think. What if the grasshopper’s brain were connected to a warning device?”
“Yeah, I guess with all the microcircuit stuff people use nowadays, hooking up a sensing system to the grasshopper’s brain might make sense. Except…well, except that we’re not talking a long-lived critter. At best, a grasshopper hits its first birthday, and then the hopping stops. What if Bond is in the vicinity of the bomb and his grasshopper dies mid-hop?”
“Hadn’t thought of the lifespan part for the film. Well, for the sake of the story this grasshopper stays healthy through the final movie credits, after which he’s put out to pasture, where he can munch on locoweed.”
“I guess your Bond idea is only half farfetched. I was unaware that grasshoppers could smell. They don’t seem to have noses. But if what you are saying is true, then I should probably reassess my own ability to know my world through my senses. I’ve been pretty smug about my abilities and knowledge; yet, there’s no way I could match a 500-millisecond recognition of volatiles wafting off a bomb. I guess I’m not really a very fine-tuned sensing machine.
“And now that you have me thinking, it occurs to me that I know very little about other organisms. Of course, even though a grasshopper can distinguish bomb scents, that doesn’t mean it knows it distinguishes among them. If a dog trained to detect the scent of bomb materials doesn’t experience fear during its Pavlovian response to them, surely a grasshopper is even less involved in the same process.
“Your Bond plot is silly, but it makes me wonder if we aren’t similar to those animals in the way we sense the world all the time without a conscious response to what we sense. We sense without knowing that we sense sometimes, don’t we? Take pheromones, for example. Can’t say I’m aware of them, but those scents supposedly affect me and you and everyone else. I suppose there are other things I unconsciously sense as I hop around my daily world. Love at first sight? Suffused with pheromones, do we look back with hindsight bias to believe we fell in love ‘at first sight’?
“Would you consider getting those brain chips implanted as Elon Musk suggests, not just in grasshoppers, but in us? Attached to some portable AI, we’ll know what we sense and think because the AI will tell us: ‘Alert! Alert! Beautiful girl approaching. Pheromone alert! Warning! You are going to stare.’ Or maybe we won’t need airport dogs to sniff out explosives. Your future Bond plot will have a TSA agent saying, ‘Passengers, be forewarned. Charlene from the TSA has been equipped with the latest implants and warning systems. Within a half second, she can tell whether a suitcase holds a bomb, drugs, or smuggled bottles of Jamaican sauce.’ If Charlene’s olfactory sense is too imprecise to detect volatiles, but Musk chips are viable brain implants, we could tie her brain to that of a grasshopper in a parallel circuit.”
“Uhm, you just gave me an idea for another script.”
*Staff report. SciNews. 14 Aug 2020. Grasshoppers Can Discriminate Between Different Explosives’ Smells, Study Finds. Online at http://www.sci-news.com/biology/grasshoppers-explosive-smell-08747.html Accessed August 14, 2020. Debajit Saha, Darshit Mehta, Ege Altan, Rishabh Chandak, Mike Traner, Ray Lo, Prashant Gupta, Srikanth Singamaneni, Shantanu Chakrabartty, Barani Raman. Explosive sensing with insect-based biorobots. Biosensors and Bioelectronics: X, 2020; 100050 DOI: 10.1016/j.biosx.2020.100050
“For me to watch, this plot’s will have to have a little more umpf than that. And a grasshopper in a box isn’t typical of one of those high-tech weapons he usually gets, like an exploding watch or some ink pen that shoots darts.”
“No, but hear me out. So, Bond sees the grasshopper, and he looks quizzically at Q. Q then says, ‘It’s a bomb-sniffing grasshopper, and here’s his leash.’ Bond gives Q one of those looks that says (in an English accent), ‘You’ve gone off the bloody deep end.’ Q then explains that grasshoppers can detect and discriminate among the scents of different bomb materials, specifically among the vapors of TNT, DNT, RDX, PETN, and ammonium nitrate. As the plot unfolds, Bond’s mission is to find an explosive device planted in the basement of Parliament—a remake of the Guy Fawkes story. So, Bond takes the grasshopper and his Beretta and speeds over to the government building in his Aston Martin. There Bond and the grasshopper fight noseblind terrorists and find and disarm the bomb just in time to save the Queen during her annual visit.”
“Whoa. Grasshopper? Smelling explosives like some airport security dog? Does Bond give it a name? How about hoppy? Too rabbit-like? Where did you get this ridiculous idea? Sounds as though you’ve gone loco on locusts. Have you been eating swainsonine in your salads?”
“No, there’s some serious science in this. Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis studied the smelling ability of Schistocerca americana, the American grasshopper. They found the bug could detect the vapor of an explosive in 500 milliseconds.* So, the idea isn’t so farfetched as you think. What if the grasshopper’s brain were connected to a warning device?”
“Yeah, I guess with all the microcircuit stuff people use nowadays, hooking up a sensing system to the grasshopper’s brain might make sense. Except…well, except that we’re not talking a long-lived critter. At best, a grasshopper hits its first birthday, and then the hopping stops. What if Bond is in the vicinity of the bomb and his grasshopper dies mid-hop?”
“Hadn’t thought of the lifespan part for the film. Well, for the sake of the story this grasshopper stays healthy through the final movie credits, after which he’s put out to pasture, where he can munch on locoweed.”
“I guess your Bond idea is only half farfetched. I was unaware that grasshoppers could smell. They don’t seem to have noses. But if what you are saying is true, then I should probably reassess my own ability to know my world through my senses. I’ve been pretty smug about my abilities and knowledge; yet, there’s no way I could match a 500-millisecond recognition of volatiles wafting off a bomb. I guess I’m not really a very fine-tuned sensing machine.
“And now that you have me thinking, it occurs to me that I know very little about other organisms. Of course, even though a grasshopper can distinguish bomb scents, that doesn’t mean it knows it distinguishes among them. If a dog trained to detect the scent of bomb materials doesn’t experience fear during its Pavlovian response to them, surely a grasshopper is even less involved in the same process.
“Your Bond plot is silly, but it makes me wonder if we aren’t similar to those animals in the way we sense the world all the time without a conscious response to what we sense. We sense without knowing that we sense sometimes, don’t we? Take pheromones, for example. Can’t say I’m aware of them, but those scents supposedly affect me and you and everyone else. I suppose there are other things I unconsciously sense as I hop around my daily world. Love at first sight? Suffused with pheromones, do we look back with hindsight bias to believe we fell in love ‘at first sight’?
“Would you consider getting those brain chips implanted as Elon Musk suggests, not just in grasshoppers, but in us? Attached to some portable AI, we’ll know what we sense and think because the AI will tell us: ‘Alert! Alert! Beautiful girl approaching. Pheromone alert! Warning! You are going to stare.’ Or maybe we won’t need airport dogs to sniff out explosives. Your future Bond plot will have a TSA agent saying, ‘Passengers, be forewarned. Charlene from the TSA has been equipped with the latest implants and warning systems. Within a half second, she can tell whether a suitcase holds a bomb, drugs, or smuggled bottles of Jamaican sauce.’ If Charlene’s olfactory sense is too imprecise to detect volatiles, but Musk chips are viable brain implants, we could tie her brain to that of a grasshopper in a parallel circuit.”
“Uhm, you just gave me an idea for another script.”
*Staff report. SciNews. 14 Aug 2020. Grasshoppers Can Discriminate Between Different Explosives’ Smells, Study Finds. Online at http://www.sci-news.com/biology/grasshoppers-explosive-smell-08747.html Accessed August 14, 2020. Debajit Saha, Darshit Mehta, Ege Altan, Rishabh Chandak, Mike Traner, Ray Lo, Prashant Gupta, Srikanth Singamaneni, Shantanu Chakrabartty, Barani Raman. Explosive sensing with insect-based biorobots. Biosensors and Bioelectronics: X, 2020; 100050 DOI: 10.1016/j.biosx.2020.100050
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