موقع د. محمود صبيح

لاهميه الموضوع اضع الشرح الانجليزى للموضوع

Bizarre Creatures Are World's First Self-Replicating 'Living Robots', Scientists Say

Scientists have engineered what they say are the first self-replicating 'robots' ever made from living cells.

At first, these freaky-looking 'xenobots' might seem notable for their superficial resemblance to Pac-Man, but their likeness to the video game character is probably the least strange thing about them.



These unusual robotic creatures are a spin-off of what the same researchers unveiled last year, when they presented the world's first robots constructed entirely out of living cells – in this case, stem cells taken from embryonic frogs.

"These are novel living machines," computer scientist and roboticist Joshua Bongard from the University of Vermont explained at the time.

"They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism."

Now, Bongard and his collaborators have taken the next step, giving the xenobots the ability to self-replicate and spawn new versions of themselves.



In this case, the self-replication isn't achieved by the kind of reproduction techniques we ordinarily see in biological life-forms.

Instead, the researchers found that if they put enough of the xenobots in close proximity with one another in a petri dish, their collective movement began to pile up other loose frog cells floating alongside in the solution.

Once enough of those cells were stacked together, the aggregated heap of about 50 cells became a kind of offspring to the xenobot organism, capable of swimming by itself, and in so doing, piling up its own offspring.

The phenomenon, called spontaneous kinematic self-replication, has been seen before in other kinds of molecular machines and models, but never before in living multicellular systems like the xenobots.



"We find that synthetic multicellular assemblies can also replicate kinematically by moving and compressing dissociated cells in their environment into functional self-copies," the researchers explain in a new paper describing the reconfigurable organisms.

"This form of perpetuation, previously unseen in any organism, arises spontaneously over days rather than evolving over millennia."

https://www.sciencealert.com/world-s-fi ... ch-weirder

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