And I’m ok with that. As we should all know, you can’t kill cockroaches. They’re no water bear, but you can step on them, burn them, freeze them, you can drop a nuclear bomb DIRECTLY ON THEM and they just. won’t. die.

So what’s a good thing to do? Make them even *more* invulnerable! A team of international scientists has successfully implanted nanobots made from strands of DNA into the systems (remember those?) of cockroaches, and they have been folded in such a way that they can actually carry out logical operations; specifically, upon meeting a specific type of chemical compound, mainly protein, they can unfold and release medicine contained in their folds.

The articles I’ve read compare this to computing power but never explain it, and that bugs me. Get it? Bugs me?

Anyway, what it means is that these nanobots essentially carry out a single binary decision, for lack of a better word. If there are many of these nanobots carrying out these binary decisions, it’s a bunch of binary events taking place in conceptually the same way they happen in a digital device. If you get enough of them in an organism, you could compare it to an actual digital device’s computing power, and these scientists have done just that; they say soon they will be able to have the equivalent processing power in these nanobots to give the cockroach the equivalent of an 8-bit computer. That would include machines like the Commodore 64, Atari 800, and Nintendo NES.

Live video by Animal Planet L!ve

The process is remarkable, an incredible advancement in nanotechnology and medicine, and if it could be deployed in humans or other mammals, it could theoretically provide cell-specific methods of fighting diseases like cancer, which as of now are only targeted very broadly.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen cockroaches used in some amazing examples of biotechnology; earlier this year, scientists in Japan managed to equip cockroaches with a sensor that allowed them to be remotely controlled, and they could then be used – as the article states – to look for trapped survivors in places humans couldn’t go. They are also rugged and require no power or fuel, making them even more appealing in this regard.

Back to the nanobots, one thing to keep in mind is that mammals risk rejecting the foreign invaders though through our built-in autoimmune response, but surprisingly the scientists are very common that human tests could start in 2015. Exciting stuff!