It is neither a plant nor an animal, but a living robot that can now reproduce. It is called Zenobot.
The stem cells of the clawed African frog (Xenopus levis) have been used as raw material. The xenobiotic is a little less than a millimeter wide. Although it was built in 2020 that could move, could work with robots like itself, but now it has a completely unique feature.
Vermont, Tufts, and Harvard University have jointly stated that they have made further changes to the Xenobot. The biggest change is that it can now reproduce, but its style is very different from that of any other plant or animal.
Michael Levin of Tufts University is a key member of this work, who says that we have seen a whole new way of biological reproduction which is amazing.
According to scientists, if some cells are separated from the rest of the embryo and placed in a suitable environment, not only do they move in a new way, but they can also reproduce in a new way.
In it, the father of the letter C, the Zeno boot, collects the stem cells scattered here and there, piles them up and they go on to become children. We know that stem cells can transform into different types of cells. To make the xenobiotic, the experts separated them from the frog’s eggs and incubated them, but they did not contain any specific genes.
Another expert, Josh Bogard, says that people consider the combination of metal and electronics to be robots, but this is not the case. We could even call our biological robot an organism made of frog cells.
A xenobiotic is like a sphere made of 3000 cells. It can replicate itself, but only in very special cases. But it does make kinetic replicas and this process has never been seen before in biology.
But here artificial intelligence (AI) was used to create billions of anatomical structures and select the best of them. The best of them was a C-shaped robot in the shape of a packman video game.
In the Petri dish, the C-shaped Xenobot placed many tiny stem cells in its mouth, and a few days later new nanobots emerged. Although this is a very early stage, it is an important development for the living robot.