A team of researchers succeeded in creating robots that can reproduce themselves. The details. Robots can now do a lot of things. But now science has succeeded in making progress that was previously difficult to imagine. A team of researchers developed robots that can reproduce themselves. The so-called "xenobots" consist of cells from frog embryos, i.e. they are biological micro-robots. In the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, they were described as "programmable organisms". How xenobots reproduce The research report states that the organisms reproduce through exercise: "They find and combine building blocks into self-copies." In their study, the research team shows that "when clusters of cells are freed from a developing organism, they can similarly find loose cells and combine them into clusters that look and move like themselves." This ability does not have to be specially developed or even introduced through genetic manipulation: "This form of reproduction, which has not been observed in any organism so far, arises spontaneously within a few days instead of developing over thousands of years." Just like Pac Man The author of the research report, Dr. Sam Kriegman, emphasizes the significance of the new findings: "These are frog cells that multiply in a way that is very different from the way frogs do. No animal or plant known to science replicates in this way." In the first attempts, the life forms died, but after the artificial intelligence provided them with their new findings, the described self-copy of the xenobots succeeded by movement. Kriegman goes on to explain, "It looks very simple, but it's not something a human engineer would come up with. We sent the results to Doug and he built these Pac-Man-shaped parent xenobots. These parents then built children, these in turn grandchildren, these great-grandchildren and these then great-great-grandchildren." The report also states that xenobots are capable of carrying and moving things. In fact, people can benefit from it. This means that the robots can be used in areas such as the removal of microplastics. So it remains exciting. Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms | PNAS Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms Edited by Terrence J. Sejnowski, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, and approved October 22, 2021 (received for review July 9, 2021) November 29, 2021 118 (49) e2112672118 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2112672118 Significance Almost all organisms replicate by growing and then shedding offspring. Some molecules also replicate, but by moving rather than growing: They find and combine building blocks into self-copies. Here we show that clusters of cells, if freed from a developing organism, can similarly find and combine loose cells into clusters that look and move like they do, and that this ability does not have to be specifically evolved or introduced by genetic manipulation. Finally, we show that artificial intelligence can design clusters that replicate better, and perform useful work as they do so. This suggests that future technologies may, with little outside guidance, become more useful as they spread, and that life harbors surprising behaviors just below the surface, waiting to be uncovered. Abstract All living systems perpetuate themselves via growth in or on the body, followed by splitting, budding, or birth. We find that synthetic multicellular assemblies can also replicate kinematically by moving and compressing dissociated cells in their environment into functional self-copies. This form of perpetuation, previously unseen in any organism, arises spontaneously over days rather than evolving over millennia. We also show how artificial intelligence methods can design assemblies that postpone loss of replicative ability and perform useful work as a side effect of replication. This suggests other unique and useful phenotypes can be rapidly reached from wild-type organisms without selection or genetic engineering, thereby broadening our understanding of the conditions under which replication arises, phenotypic plasticity, and how useful replicative machines may be realized.