Robocopulation
Tiny bots reproduce
The world’s first “living” robots — called xenobots — can now reproduce, US scientists have revealed.
Details about the tiny robots, which are made from heart and skin stem cells of the African clawed frog, were unveiled last year after experiments showed they could move and self-heal.
Now scientists at Tufts University, the University of Vermont and Harvard who made the xenobots say the tiny blobs can also self-replicate.
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 around in their dish, gathering together single stem cells and assembling them into “baby” xenobots.
A few days afterwards, the babies become new xenobots that look and move just like the initial creations. The new xenobots can then go out and selfreplicate again, the scientists say.
Xenobots, which are less than a millimeter wide, are made simply by incubating living stem cells scraped from frog embryos.
The scientists said they’ve proven a new form of biological reproduction.
“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, who worked on the study.
“This is profound,” added Michael Levin, co-leader of the research. “These cells have the genome of a frog, but, freed from becoming tadpoles, they use their collective intelligence, a plasticity, to do something astounding.”
The team said the new research could be beneficial for advancements in regenerative medicine.