The Conversation

Not bot, not beast: scientists create first ever living, programmable organism

19-01-2020 Author: Simon Coghlan, Senior Research Fellow in Digital Ethics, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne

A remarkable combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and biology has produced the world’s first “living robots”.

This week, a research team of roboticists and scientists published their recipe for making a new lifeform called xenobots from stem cells. The term “xeno” comes from the frog cells (Xenopus laevis) used...

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