[liberationtech] Scientists use stem cells from frogs to build first living robots

[Paola Di Maio]

Thanks
I have seen the news this morning but had not had the time to process this
info
I find this shocking and potentially lethal, because we dont know how the
new
species will interact with natural species. Paid for by US taxpayers and
sponsored by Defense, is even more worrying.  I d suggest you guys in the
US start working on bioethics legislation to keep a tab
at a minimum these things should not be released in the wild,  and should
be strictly regulated, imho
PDM

On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 2:41 PM Yosem Companys <ycompanys at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/13/scientists-use-stem-cells-from-frogs-to-build-first-living-robots
>
> Researchers in the US have created the first living machines by assembling
> cells from African clawed frogs into tiny robots that move around under
> their own steam.  “These are entirely new lifeforms. They have never before
> existed on Earth,” said Michael Levin, the director of the Allen Discovery
> Center at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. “They are living,
> programmable organisms.” The robots, which are less than 1mm long, are
> designed by an “evolutionary algorithm” that runs on a supercomputer. The
> program starts by generating random 3D configurations of 500 to 1,000 skin
> and heart cells. Each design is then tested in a virtual environment, to
> see, for example, how far it moves when the heart cells are set beating.
> The best performers are used to spawn more designs, which themselves are
> then put through their paces.  Because heart cells spontaneously contract
> and relax, they behave like miniature engines that drive the robots along
> until their energy reserves run out. The cells have enough fuel inside them
> for the robots to survive for a week to 10 days before keeling over.  The
> scientists waited for the computer to churn out 100 generations before
> picking a handful of designs to build in the lab. They used tweezers and
> cauterising tools to sculpt early-stage skin and heart cells scraped from
> the embryos of African clawed frogs, Xenopus laevis. The source of the
> cells led the scientists to call their creations “xenobots”.  Xenobots
> might be built with blood vessels, nervous systems and sensory cells, to
> form rudimentary eyes. By building them out of mammalian cells, they could
> live on dry land. When damaged, living robots can heal their wounds, and
> once their task is done they fall apart, just as natural organisms decay
> when they die.  Their unique features mean that future versions of the
> robots might be deployed to clean up microplastic pollution in the oceans,
> locate and digest toxic materials, deliver drugs in the body, or remove
> plaque from artery walls. “The aim is to understand the software of life,”
> Levin said. “If you think about birth defects, cancer, age-related
> diseases, all of these things could be solved if we knew how to make
> biological structures, to have ultimate control over growth and form.” The
> research is funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s
> lifelong learning machines programme, which aims to recreate biological
> learning processes in machines.
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