Xenobots: the first live robots, with autonomy, capable of providing great advances in the scientific field and all kinds of practical uses. They are neither robots nor animals, they are a new creation and will revolutionize the world as we know it.
Able to heal themselves, they measure less than 1mm in sufficient size with the ability to travel within the human body. They can walk and swim, survive weeks without food. They can also work individually or in groups.
The researchers used live stem cells from frog embryos and allowed them to incubate. Then they were cut and molded into special shapes designed by a supercomputer and are shapes never seen before in nature
Once assembled the cells began to work by themselves. The skin cells joined together to form a structure, while the pulsing heart muscle cells allowed the robot to move on its own.
Xenobots have self-healing abilities, in the experiment they tore a xenobot and it rebuilt itself. Biological programming is simply brutal. The xenobots do not resemble traditional robots: They do not have bright gears, or robotic arms, we talk about programmable biological machines.
When we design machines to solve problems in our organisms, they have as their counterpart that they degrade over time or can cause side effects that are harmful to health and ecology. But instead this new way of life is not harmful to health, since when they stop being usefu, they simply die automatically their behavior is as if they were dead skin.
Imagine this in a practical subject, so we could use it. Imagine that we could use them to collect microplastics in the ocean, transport medicines inside our body, unlock an artery or nerve, these xenobots could cleanse our body.
In addition to these practical tasks, xenobots can also help researchers understand how biology works, many types of these xenobots have already been designed but not all have the same desirable behavior. Several of the collaborators in this project indicate that some xenobots end up having a terrifying behavior …. “… they change their movement from time to time, so they will move in a particular way, then they will change it again. Then they will give around and they will come back. When they find small loose cells, they group them together and make small shapes … two xenobots could move like a happy couple.
Personal point of view:
Imagine what can happen in the study of these new living beings that we have created. Now everything seems possible as the typical scene of the T1000 in terminator that joins and returns to its original form … And let’s not say just as now we could attack many problems worldwide, restore the planet, cure diseases directly without ingesting so many medications. Remember that there is always a bad side, and that in my point of view I think it is what happened in China, because of the way these xenobots operate, it would be very easy to undo evidence of how to transport or attack any country or region with this kind of life. The truth is that there are very few studies in the light of this kind of xenobot life, that everyone can imagine different ways of using them both good and bad… what do you think or how and why would you use them if you had the opportunity to program them?
Sources:
https://www.dezeen.com/2020/01/15/xenobots-living-robots-frog-cells-technology/
https://www.wired.com/story/xenobot/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot