EDITED FOR CLARITY 2

BBC News recently ran an article with the ominous title, "US 'plans stealth shark spies'", explaining:

Pentagon scientists are planning to turn sharks into "stealth spies" capable of tracking vessels undetected, a British magazine has reported.

They want to remotely control the sharks by implanting electrodes in their brains, The New Scientist says.

The non-military applications of the technology are omitted from the BBC rewrite of the original New Scientist article. This is left out:

John Chapin of the State University of New York Health Science Center in Brooklyn has used a similar tactic to guide rats through rubble piles (New Scientist, 25 September 2004, p 21).

The New York Police Department is considering recruiting Chapin's rats to its disaster response team, where they could be used to detect bombs or even trapped people, and Chapin met them to discuss the possibility last month.

As is this:

Jaideep Mavoori at the University of Washington in Seattle has developed a neural implant for monkeys that can monitor brain activity while the primates play. "We believe we are the first to record neural activity from a monkey doing a somersault," Mavoori says.

Mavoori's implant can also stimulate one part of the brain in response to activity in another, and has a microchip that can interpret the neural signals and send a message to another part of the brain or a muscle accordingly. He and his colleagues believe such an implant might ultimately help humans compensate for lost nerve function caused by injury or disease.

And this gets the chop:

Fisheries scientists are investigating the use of neural implants to control the behaviour of farmed fish. They hope the tags will eliminate the need to pen and feed fish, a practice that pollutes the surrounding waters and promotes disease. Instead, the plan is to let the fish loose to forage for themselves and then retrieve them when they are large enough to harvest.

Yep, it's of paramount importance to be aware of the Pentagon's evil manipulation of our finned friends' brains but bomb-detecting rescue rats, radical advances in medical technology and the possibility of huge advances in fish-farming efficiency aren't worth mentioning. One of those Bs in BBC has to be for bias.

Update: The Independent's Steve Connor not only ignores the non-military aspects of the research, he embellishes:

Military scientists in the United States are developing a way of manipulating sharks by remote control to turn them into underwater spies or weapons.

A shark with one of these strapped to it perhaps? Predictably, The Independent article is picked up by this fine site, which gets a link from this guy, a thorough researcher if ever there was one.