Scientists use frog stem cells to create 'living, programmable organisms'

Visions of the future have long featured robots and cyborgs. We've seen robots, and even rudimentary human augmentation already, but now scientists have created the world's first living robots. American researchers used cells from African clawed frogs to build biological machines from the ground up. Built from different biological tissues, scientists have brought into being "living, programmable organisms" and potentially opened up an ethical can of worms. Researchers Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin and Josh Bongard explain their work in a paper entitled "A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms" published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.… [Continue Reading]