Meet the xenobots - reconfigurable organisms

[DennisN]

TL;DR

Title of paper below: "A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms"

Articles:

• Team Builds the First Living Robots (The University of Vermont)
• Meet the xenobot: world's first living, self-healing robots created from frog stem cells (CNN)

"These are novel living machines," says Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research. "They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism."

Paper:
Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, and Josh Bongard,
A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms
(PNAS, January 13, 2020)
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/01/07/1910837117

Some pictures:

Very interesting and extremely fascinating to me, and when I heard of it, I immediately thought I should post about it on PF.

 

[ScoeyB]

I am by no means a technophobe or a person who misconstrues the value of science to the future of humanity. I see this is a very troubling development. It is not clear who controls this new biotech, a proto-borg technology that mixes two already controversial technologies, bio engineering and nanotech. With the whimsical amateur CRISPR adventure Frankenstiens trying to make human-aligator hybirds (Who says they're not? Do you actually believe one of those idiots is NOT trying to create human-aligator hybrids? Really? Really?) and the obvious failure of any government on Earth to deal with the out-of-control databases of personal information, and I mean PERSONAL information being stockpiled as some sort of insurance against anti-trust actions, when you combine the peanut butter with the chocolate, I fear for the future. An emphasis on ethics is notably absent from the business end of science and tech lately.

 

[jim mcnamara]

@ScoeyB - What you mention has some validity, but is largely opinion based. Unless you can back up your claims with actual science references (not .e.g, Mother Earth News) any more comments like this will shut down the thread. We do not do PF science ethics and sociology here at PF in the science forums. If you want, post in the general discussion section, please do so, just not here. Thanks for understanding.