Zombie Machines Designed By A Supercomputer
Just breed some skin and heart cells from frog embryos and you can make your own xenobots. It isn't alive but at the same time it isn't dead making it the very first synthetic and programmable undead life form.
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Its Alive! Or Is It?
Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay
Xenobots are certainly amazing. The truly remarkable artificial life forms made by scientists from the University of Vermont (UVM) and Tufts University. They are programmable and made from living cells without being alive in the traditional sense of the word.
Josh Bongard from UVM and his colleagues created their zombie machines from skin and heart cells of African clawed frogs. They took the cells and organized them into a stable structure under a microscope. But first, they needed to know into what structure to order them and the design came from the Deep Greed supercomputer. The end shape sort of resembles a drop of goo with four legs. And the heart cells work as pumps and allow the machines to work.
What needs to be said is the fact that these tiny zombies are something completely new. They aren't robots but at the same time, they aren't organisms. They are “alive” but at the same time programmable entities – xenobots. The name comes from the Latin name of the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis and got the great double entendre as a bonus.
Xenobots To Save The Environment And Human Lives
The xenobot is about a single millimeter in size so you can see them with the naked eye. Tests show that the xenobots are capable of functioning in a hospitable environment for days and even weeks. To “live” the xenobots use energy that was stored in the original embryos that were intended for their development.
An interesting benefit is that the xenobots are capable of regenerating. When the scientists split them apart they regenerated of their own accord. And once they finish their job it just harmlessly dissolves without doing any damage to the body or the environment. These zombies are safe.
Sadly, at this moment xenobots cannot do much. According to their creators that wasn't the point though. Bongard and his coworkers just needed to test the concept of “living” programmable machines. But over time they could become the foundation for many different applications like cleaning the environment or even the human bodies. For example, the researchers imagined how their xenobots search for radioactive material, collect microplastic or clean human blood vessels from dangerous sediment.
The Deep Green supercomputer used evolution algorithms to design the xenobots. It created thousands of different variants of their design and started the simulations. Once it evaluated the success of each of the xenobot variants it took the most successful ones to design a new batch of designs. While somewhat cumbersome the algorithms are incredibly effective.
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