The World's first living robots that can reproduce:

[beecee]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-unveiled-the-worlds-first-living-robots-last-year-now-they-can-now-reproduce-180979150/

Scientists Unveiled the World’s First Living Robots Last Year. Now, They Can Reproduce:

By clustering free-floating stem cells together, ‘xenobots’ can assemble baby bots:

Early last year, a team of researchers announced the world's first living machines—bundles of stem cells from African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) that could be programmed to accomplish certain tasks. The sand grain–sized cells could successfully move microscopic objects, whiz around Petri dishes and even self-heal, Katherine J. Wu reported for Smithsonian last year.

"Most people think of robots as made of metals and ceramics but it's not so much what a robot is made from but what it does, which is act on its own on behalf of people," co-author Josh Bongard, a computer scientist at the University of Vermont, tells Katie Hunt for CNN. "In that way it's a robot, but it's also clearly an organism made from genetically unmodified frog cell."

Since their original study, the team has been working to harness the power of these tiny robots—named "xenobots" after the clawed frogs' genus Xenopus. In a new development, the team announced that xenobots can now reproduce in a way that is completely different from any plant or animal known to science: by scooping up free-floating cells and assembling them into new clusters, Nicola Davis reports for the Guardian. The team published their findings this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

more at link...............

[CharonY]

I actually wanted to write a topic on that paper but more in form of a critique, then forgot about it. Luckily here is an article that echoes a lot of my thoughts on it.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/mobile-clusters-of-cells-can-help-assemble-a-mini-version-of-themselves/

[beecee]

2 minutes ago, CharonY said:

I actually wanted to write a topic on that paper but more in form of a critique, then forgot about it. Luckily here is an article that echoes a lot of my thoughts on it.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/mobile-clusters-of-cells-can-help-assemble-a-mini-version-of-themselves/

Thanks for that...I was looking forward to some reasonable critique on the matter, as I was somewhat questionable on the full nature of their claims in my OP. Still, its progress and who knows where to from here......the mind boggles!