As someone who works with Paramecium (and a whole host of other protists) on a daily basis this story has fairly grabbed my imagination!
This is hardly the first synthesis of computer and "real life", my favourite of these huge advances has to be the rat brain controlled robot (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7559150.stm) from way back in 2008.
However the novel use of stimuli in this study to move the paramecium is a great idea, and may well be useful in future studies, not simply for entertainment, but to control the positions of certain organisms within model systems, and for that potentially use this study is really exciting. The ability to restrict organisms from certain areas of a community would allow for some pretty complex and exciting interaction experiments.
Chris
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