At some point during the countdown, Spacebat—a Free-Tailed Chiroptera—was spotted latched to the foam of the external fuel tank, occasionally moving but never letting go. Wildlife experts deduced that he had injured his wing and shoulder, leaving him with little chance of survival. He remained on the tank until launch. NASA's cold report?

The animal likely perished quickly during Discovery's climb into orbit.

True! But here's how it should have read:

Bereft of his ability to fly and with nowhere to go, a courageous bat climbed aboard our Discovery with stars in his weak little eyes. The launch commenced, and Spacebat trembled as his frail mammalian body was gently pushed skyward. For the last time, he felt the primal joy of flight; for the first, the indescribable feeling of ascending toward his dream—a place far away from piercing screeches and crowded caves, stretching forever into fathomless blackness.

Whether he was consumed in the exhaust flames or frozen solid in the stratosphere is of no concern. We know that Spacebat died, but his dream will live on in all of us.

There you go, NASA. Spacebat's majestic final moment is pictured below. [NASA via Fark]

What happens is the bats' internal echolocation, which tracks movement, attracts them to the blades of wind turbines, which presents another fairly obvious problem. But a University of Calgary researcher, puzzled by bats dying off in large numbers around wind farms in southern Alberta has found that those that don't get cut down by the blades (surprisingly only 50%) are actually dying from exploded lungs, or barotrauma; the low pressure areas around the spinning rotors, as explained by our friend Bernoulli, cause the bats' tiny air sacs to burst. Even those that do get knocked out of the sky by the blades have their lungs popped beforehand—of the 188 dead bats in the study, 90% had barotrauma as the cause of death.

I'm thinking this is going to have to remain one of those problems without an immediate solution. Hopefully the bats will evolve to realize that the massive spinning turbine blades do not equal a tasty insectoid meal. [New Scientist, Photo: Zeusandhera]

[Instructables]

The acoustic kitty was a bionic feline with a 3/4-inch radio transmitter embedded at the base of its skull. The transmitter's antenna was woven in to the cat's fur, while the microphone was placed in the cat's ear canal. Yes, PeTA members, the cat project did consider "questions of humane treatment." Once the system was up and running, the cats didn't seem to mind it at all. Boom, total success right? Well, no. Spycraft author Bob Wallace told me in an interview: "The cat wanted to do what the cat wanted to do, and not what we wanted it to do."

The British secret service actually used mice in a similar fashion, not as live microphones, but as a means to drag wire along the studs inside walls. The CIA trained pigeons to fly to laser dots and drop payloads, generally wireless mics. Obviously dogs too were trained for ops—though the Soviets were up on dog training, too, according to Spycraft co-author Keith Melton: the KGB trained dogs to sniff out the glue used by the CIA in equipment drops.

Says Melton re: animals in the line of duty: "If you have a choice between putting human and animals at risk—and I'm an animal lover—you have to use an animal."Dead animals worked as well or better. Deceased rats, which apparently had lived long happy lives and died of natural causes, were hollowed out and used to stash secret information for drops in hostile territory. The reasoning was that people don't go around picking up dead rats to see what's inside. As for animals who might be looking for a tasty snack, the rats were painted with Tabasco sauce, repellent to every critter but humans. Fun fact: The CIA used white rats for this, so that they could dye them to match the indigenous coloration of local rats.Before the CIA was born, live rats—with wings—were considered for strategic use. Project X-Ray a.k.a. BAT was an OSS plan to release 1 million bats rigged with tiny explosives over Japan towards the end of World War II. Bats from Carlsbad Cavern in New Mexico were brought to a test facility. According to Spycraft, the bats' most successful test run resulted in the fiery destruction of a new hangar. The plan was killed off, it seems, because no one knew how to automate the bat-arming process in a cost-effective manner. Bombs were also attempted with the Norwegian rat and trained domestic cats, who were supposed to swim to a target after being dropped in the ocean. (Anyone see a problem with that?) [More CIA Spytech on Giz]

All of this CIA tech and much more like it is covered with great depth and hair-raising anecdotes in Spycraft, a new book by Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, reviewed by us, and available for pre-order at Amazon.

The proposal is for the bat to be just six inches in length, weigh only four ounces and use just one watt of power, backed by a lithium-ion battery, which could be charged by not just solar energy, but wind energy and random vibrations as well. The bat's intended goal would be to run surveillance ops and relay data in realtime, including sights and sounds from minicams and mini-microphones, but also radiation and poison gas readings.

The UMich grant consists of $10 million over five years, creating the U-M Center for Objective Microelectronics and Biomimetic Advanced Technology (dubbed "COM-BAT"—pun intended). The focus is to shrink down many electronics that while currently available would only be good if the US Army wanted, say, a 12-foot spy-bat. Not too stealthy.

For energy recovery, UMich will work to develop "quantum dot solar cells," making current solar cells twice as nice. The bat's autonomous navi system will be 1,000 times smaller than current systems, and that much more energy efficient too. The comms system will be shrunk to one-tenth the current size, too. You can see how all of this shrinkage will have positive impact outside the bionic-bat community as well. [UMich via Ubergizmo]