Uh oh, world's first living robots can now reproduce
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Postmedia News
Publishing date:
Nov 30, 2021 • 13 hours ago • 1 minute read •
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Tiny blobs made from heart and skin stem cells from the African clawed frog.
Tiny blobs made from heart and skin stem cells from the African clawed frog. Photo by Screengrab /Study
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Well, this never happened in the Terminator movies.
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Scientists at Tufts University, the University of Vermont and Harvard, say xenobots, otherwise known as the world’s first living robots, can now reproduce, according to the New York Post.
Now, these aren’t robots in the traditional sense; they are tiny blobs made from heart and skin stem cells from the African clawed frog.
But still, the headline still makes you stop and think.
The original plan had been released last year.
The results of the new research were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.
Experiments showed that the organisms can swim out into their dish, find other single cells and assemble “baby” xenobots, according to the report.
The offspring look like the originals and can then replicate again, according to the research.
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Xenobots, which are less than a millimetre wide, are designed on a computer and assembled by hand.
“People have thought for quite a long time that we’ve worked out all the ways that life can reproduce or replicate. But this is something that’s never been observed before,” said Douglas Blackiston, one of the co-authors of the study.
“This is profound,” added Michael Levin, another study co-leader. “These cells have the genome of a frog, but, freed from becoming tadpoles, they use their collective intelligence, a plasticity, to do something astounding.
“All of these different problems are here because we don’t know how to predict and control what groups of cells are going to build. Xenobots are a new platform for teaching us.”
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torontosun.com
Author of the article:
Postmedia News
Publishing date:
Nov 30, 2021 • 13 hours ago • 1 minute read •
Join the conversation
Tiny blobs made from heart and skin stem cells from the African clawed frog.
Tiny blobs made from heart and skin stem cells from the African clawed frog. Photo by Screengrab /Study
Article content
Well, this never happened in the Terminator movies.
Advertisement
Story continues below
Article content
Scientists at Tufts University, the University of Vermont and Harvard, say xenobots, otherwise known as the world’s first living robots, can now reproduce, according to the New York Post.
Now, these aren’t robots in the traditional sense; they are tiny blobs made from heart and skin stem cells from the African clawed frog.
But still, the headline still makes you stop and think.
The original plan had been released last year.
The results of the new research were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.
Experiments showed that the organisms can swim out into their dish, find other single cells and assemble “baby” xenobots, according to the report.
The offspring look like the originals and can then replicate again, according to the research.
Advertisement
Story continues below
Article content
Xenobots, which are less than a millimetre wide, are designed on a computer and assembled by hand.
“People have thought for quite a long time that we’ve worked out all the ways that life can reproduce or replicate. But this is something that’s never been observed before,” said Douglas Blackiston, one of the co-authors of the study.
“This is profound,” added Michael Levin, another study co-leader. “These cells have the genome of a frog, but, freed from becoming tadpoles, they use their collective intelligence, a plasticity, to do something astounding.
“All of these different problems are here because we don’t know how to predict and control what groups of cells are going to build. Xenobots are a new platform for teaching us.”
Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms
Almost all organisms replicate by growing and then shedding offspring. Some molecules also replicate, but by moving rather than growing: They find and combine building blocks into self-copies. Here we show that clusters of cells, if freed from a developing organism, can similarly find and...
World’s first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say
Details about the robots, created using the heart and skin stem cells from the African clawed frog, were unveiled last year after experiments showed they could move and self-heal.
nypost.com
Uh oh, world's first living robots can now reproduce
Uh oh, world's first living robots can now reproduce
