UVM and Tufts Team Builds First Living Robots

Scientists from UVM and Tufts repurposed living cells scraped from frog embryos and assembled them into entirely new life-forms. More:   These tiny “xenobots” can move toward a target and heal themselves after being cut.   “These are novel living machines,” says UVM robotics expert Joshua Bongard.   They’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal.   It’s a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism. The new creatures were designed on a supercomputer at UVM, and then assembled by biologists at Tufts University.   Scientists think they could be useful for: searching out radioactive contamination gathering plastic pollution in the oceans traveling in arteries to scrape out plaque