Behold the xenobots – part frog, part robot. But are they alive?
At first, they are just blurry blobs. But when Douglas Blackiston turns a knob on the microscope, they suddenly come to life in sharp relief.
They look like miniature, lumpy matzo balls suspended in water, but they move as if swimming with intention.
These are no ordinary lifeforms. Rather, Dr. Blackiston built them using frog stem cells and the guidance of artificial intelligence. They are the first “living robots.”
At least that’s how Dr. Blackiston of Tufts University and his colleagues at Tufts and the University of Vermont (UVM) describe them. But these “xenobots” – a nod to the , or African clawed frog – don’t fit neatly among nature’s creatures
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