You’re Trapped Under Rubble And These Guys Are Your EMTs. WYD?

A nightmare has happened. Maybe you were minding your own business in the office when an earthquake hit, or maybe you were spelunking in some wretched cave never meant for humans to enter. Yet regardless of how you got here, you are now trapped and in need of urgent medical attention. There’s too much debris to clear before a paramedic would be able to reach you … a human paramedic, that is. But this guy? This guy eats rubble for breakfast.

This is a giant burrowing cockroach, and it is approximately as long as a lime. It lives and burrows in—you guessed it—Australia. In the wild, the giant burrowing cockroach mostly stick around their burrows. They can live up to 10 years. The roaches only come to the surface at night, gathering leaves, twigs, and bark from the forest floor to feast on later, back underground. In other words, regular giant burrowing cockroaches do not have jobs or any semblance of medical training. Regular giant burrowing cockroaches would be ill-equipped to save you in an emergency situation. But this is not a regular roach. It is a cyborg roach, the fusion of an actual insect and a robot. The researchers behind this creation have dubbed it the paraborg, per a paper recently published in the journal Advanced Science.