Swarmbots

Duke University’s Lingchong You has created “swarmbots“ that can’t run away from home--refugees quickly die without protective proteins produced by their peers. Dubbed “swarmbots” for their ability to survive in a crowd, the system could be used as a safeguard to stop genetically modified organisms from escaping into the surrounding environment. It could also reliably program colonies of bacteria to respond to changes in their surrounding environment, for example, causing them to respond to pathogens by t