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Subject: Xenobots
Replies: 14 Views: 676

shadow27 15.01.20 - 12:31pm
Are we entering a new evolutionary epoch? ''A book is made of wood. But it is not a tree. The dead cells have been repurposed to serve another need,'' say researchers at the University of Vermont who have repurposed living cells - scraped from frog embryos - and assembled them into entirely new life-forms. These millimeter-wide ''xenobots'', a 21st-century echo of Mary Shellys Frankenstein, can move toward a target, perhaps pick up a payload (like a medicine that needs to be carried to a specific place inside a patient) and heal themselves after being cut. * +

shadow27 15.01.20 - 12:35pm
''These are novel living machines. Theyre neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. Its a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.'' says Josh Bongard, at the University of Vermont research centers on evolutionary robotics, evolutionary computation and physical simulation. He runs the Morphology, Evolution Cognition Laboratory, whose work focuses on the role that morphology and evolution play in cognition, who co-led the new research. * +

shadow27 15.01.20 - 12:38pm

The new creatures were designed on a supercomputer at UVM - and then assembled and tested by biologists at Tufts University. ''We can imagine many useful applications of these living robots that other machines cant do,'' says co-leader Michael Levin who directs the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts, 'like searching out nasty compounds or radioactive contamination, gathering microplastic in the oceans, traveling in arteries to scrape out plaque.'' * +

rainingkrypton 15.01.20 - 12:40pm
Self-replicating nanobot space probes was my Achilles heel. Able to terraform planets, converting CO2 into O2. Can travel the vastness of space at an atrocious (positive meaning) velocity, using 'space dust' to repair and replicate - using as a fuel source the universe's abundant H atoms scattered literally everywhere! * +

shadow27 15.01.20 - 12:41pm
With months of processing time on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at UVMs Vermont Advanced Computing Core, the team - including lead author and doctoral student Sam Kriegman- used an evolutionary algorithm to create thousands of candidate designs for the new life-forms. Attempting to achieve a task assigned by the scientists -like locomotion in one direction -the computer would, over and over, reassemble a few hundred simulated cells into myriad forms and body shapes. As the programs ran - driven by basic rules about the biophysics of what single frog skin and cardiac cells can do - the more successful simulated organisms were kept and refined, while failed designs were tossed out. After a hundred independent runs of the algorithm, the most promising designs were selected for testing. * +

shadow27 15.01.20 - 12:43pm
The team of scientists at the University of Vermont and Tufts University designed living robots on a UVM supercomputer. Then, at Tufts, they re-purposed living frog cells and assembled them into entirely new life-forms. These tiny xenobots can move on their own, circle a target and heal themselves after being cut. These novel living machines are neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. Theyre a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism. * +

shadow27 15.01.20 - 12:46pm
Then the team at Tufts, led by Levin and with key work by microsurgeon Douglas Blackiston - transferred the in silico designs into life. First they gathered stem cells, harvested from the embryos of African frogs, the species Xenopus laevis. (Hence the name xenobots.) These were separated into single cells and left to incubate. Then, using tiny forceps and an even tinier electrode, the cells were cut and joined under a microscope into a close approximation of the designs specified by the computer.. * +

shadow27 15.01.20 - 12:47pm
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