Monday, June 2, 2008

the cat's out of the bag: the soviet neurobiology gap appears to have been veterinary...


Just. ew.

according to english russia

These guys penetrated the abandoned and sealed science lab of Russian Army which conducted sophisticated experiments studying human and animal brains. They got a lot photos of many test samples in an abandoned state but still excellent condition. You can see even the last Soviet leader Gorbachev that was left in rush - it was the time of his rule when the lab was closed and sealed from civilians.

yeah right, 'secret army lab...' it looks like an abandoned community college, honestly. all i see are cat and rat parts, maybe some monkey eyes in that jar. i doubt that this is really the good stuff.

it did remind of a great little failure that the cia once undertook: operation acoustic kitty. basically we thought it would be a good idea to embed radio transmitters into felines and then deploy them (using don adams dressed as a crazy cat lady i'm guessing) near kgb moles talking on park benches in washington. after 20 mil was dumped into this program, the cat's maiden voyage was almost immediately ended when it decided to run under a moving taxi...



if only we could have been better friends to the soviets perhaps today we would all own headless radio transmitting dogs or some other wonderful innovation that this kind of research leads to in peacetime.

this sort of crap isn't over either, in fact, we're just starting to roll out the 2.0 stuff with a frighteningly high degree of improvement over the suiciding radio cats of the 60s.

2 comments:

stir.max.alot said...

holy shit, every single one of those links was totally over the rainbow nuts. i read every one of them, and i'm going to read every single one of them again. quality find

George F.K. said...

That "headless radio-transmitting dogs" link is absolutely staggering. I could read that again and again, even though I knew a lot of that already.

Also for some reason the cat story reminds me of the story of dog deployment in Stalingrad. The Red Army would starve dogs and then let them loose on mock battlefields to find food underneath cars. In this way, they got trained to run underneath any car or truck. Then the Soviets would send them out on the real battlefield while strapped with explosives and a trigger sticking straight up from their collar. They'd run "under" a troop transport, with the trigger striking against the undercarriage: boom, exploded dog and enemy soldiers. Supposedly it made German troops so paranoid that they'd pretty much execute any dog they saw.