Fly-Powered Gadgets Turn You Into A Terrifying Supervillain (To Insects)

All those fly-catchers—the sticky ones, the glowing ones, the zappy ones—seem like such a waste. Surely there’s something to do with all those fly carcasses, aside from cringing at them. Enter James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau—insect nemeses.

Their “carnivorous robot” prototypes are simple in concept, if not execution: each gadget, be it a lamp, clock, or heretofore unnamed generic killing device, powers itself with special fuel cells that are able to produce electricity by processing the bodies of flies, and in one case, mice.

Auger and Loizeau’s unsettling apparati, including the the sticky conveyor belt clock above, sound an awful lot like the basement experiments of a troubled tween chemistry enthusiast. In reality, and as evidenced by the devices’ creative construction and execution, the pair are designers, and the carnivorous robots are pieces of art, not masked cries for help. [New Scientist via Hackaday via Engadget]