WION news segment, “Tech It Out,” takes a look at the world of robotics and the interesting stories that will blow your mind.
Robots are advancing quickly and are now capable of things much more than the average human can imagine.
The researchers from the universities of Vermont, Tufts, and Harvard made the living robots by removing and incubating living stem cells from frog embryos.
The living robots are called “xenobots” because the cells were taken from the embryos of the African clawed frog which is called xenopus.
These stem cells are capable of growing into different cells, such as brain cells, blood cells, and bone cells.
Co-author Professor Michael Levin from Tufts University explains that the xenobots are not reproducing in normal biological ways.
Levin explains that what the cells can do is make copies of themselves – not just of individual cells, but of the whole organism.
“They do this in a completely novel way because they can’t do it in the way that they would normally as a frog. This is not how frogs reproduce, but they’ve figured out a new way to carry out a similar function, which is to replicate the structure of the bot,” he said.
