The Ultimate Spy? Bio-Drone “Melts Aways Into Puddle of Inconspicuous Goo”

Reconnaissance and spying is relatively easy these days, between electronic gadgets, undercover agents and drones in the sky.

But what about when something goes wrong? How do you keep your enemy, or target, from knowing they were spied on?

It is more than just a theoretical question – downed aircraft has been the spark for foreign policy spats since the dawn of aviation. At the height of the Cold War, a downed U2 spy plane derailed peace talks between the Eisenhower Administration and the Soviet Union.

More recently, accusations soared when Iran claimed to have shot down an Israeli spy drone.

Now, the latest in synthetic biology design could help hide the fact that a drone was ever even there – if indeed it were there at all, and if indeed it were to crash, lose contact or get captured. From NASA’s Ames Research Center:

Drones have proved invaluable for those who want to explore remote locations […] But a crash in such a location […] also lets everyone know that you’ve been spying. A bio-drone could potentially avoid that by degrading away in a puddle of inconspicuous goo.

“No one would know if you’d spilled some sugar water or if there’d been an airplane there,” says Lynn Rothschild of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, who led the team who created the drone.

The bulk of the prototype is made of a root-like fungal material called mycelium. It was cultivated in a custom drone shape by Ecovative Design, a company in Green Island, New York […]

Coating the sheets are proteins cloned from the saliva of paper wasps – usually used to waterproof their nests. Circuits were printed in silver nanoparticle ink, in an effort to make the device as biodegradable as possible.

There are, of course, a few technical kinks in potential designs, but that can likely all be worked out with a little clandestine finesse and some engineering tweaks.

H/t to Blacklisted News