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Xenobot: A New Kind Of Programmable Organism! What if we integrated recent advances in the domains of computer technology and biotechnology? The offspring of such a union might resemble something that experts have recently constructed a living robot! Yes, a robot that lives like an organism but is designed by humans. What exactly is a Xenobot? The year 2020 may be remembered for the Covid-19 pandemic, but researchers in the United States accomplished something extraordinary this year as well: they created the first living robot. While it is currently the size of a grain of salt, it has some promising prospects. This bio robot has been dubbed a xenobot by researchers. A xenobot, in contrast to other types of robots, is a very small robot. It is not made of metal, plastic, or other man-made materials. Rather, it is made up of organic cellular substances. Xenobot can scurry around or rotate in circles. It can turn backwards like an insect if you flip it on its back! It’s essentially a designed robot, but it’s ALIVE! It’s natural to be perplexed by the concept of a “living robot,” and that’s okay. According to researchers, this is a whole new life type that you would never have learnt about in school or college. The purpose for developing a xenobot Researchers were experimenting with taking real-life cells and programming them to perform exactly as they desired, similar to other robots developed in recent years. So, researchers from Tufts University and the University of Vermont extracted stem cells from an African clawed frog embryo (Xenopus Laevis). The stem cells collected by the researchers were of two types: skin cells and heart cells. Skin cells were chosen because of their proclivity to spontaneously connect, whereas heart cells were chosen because of their ability to relax and contract. The concept was to mix skin and cardiac cells in a certain way to create a functioning structure with locomotive capabilities. That was the researchers’ goal: to create an organic robot with a distinct locomotion style. Developing the first xenobot Supercomputer modelling and evolutionary algorithms The initial step in developing a xenobot was to send recorded data from stem cells into an evolutionary algorithm running on a supercomputer. Based on this information, the supercomputer quickly generated millions of cell combinations, which researchers could then examine for the intended conclusion. Natural selection was employed by the
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