
The Xenobots, Virtual Creatures Brought to Life - vo2maxer
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/science/xenobots-robots-frogs-xenopus.html
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A4ET8a8uTh0
While part of me immediately fears biological variation of the Iron Wind, I
absolutely enjoyed the article. This is really what I come to HN for.

What did trouble me somewhat is the ending where the author effectively says,
and I am paraphrasing, that bothering with ethics of it in a world, where we,
as a species, demonstrably do not follow ethics is kinda silly ( he lists
human designed pathogens as a way to substantiate it). I had trouble accepting
that argument that despite knowing that factually he is correct.

edit: replaced true at the end with "factually he is correct"

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erikig
So as I understand it, biologists and computer scientists take clumps of frog
embryo cells and engineer their shapes to allow them to perform specific
tasks?

Fascinating!

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cellular
I wonder if they could use simple rules to get emergent behaviour like this:
[https://youtu.be/gaFKqOBTj9w](https://youtu.be/gaFKqOBTj9w)

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pjmlp
For a moment it got me thinking it was about these Xenobots,

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dp6Rlf-2Wg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dp6Rlf-2Wg)

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pgt
"All of which makes xenobots amazing and maybe slightly unsettling — golems
dreamed in silicon and then written into flesh."

'Golem' is the right word. Something about seeing these artificial "organisms"
thrash about bothers me.

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codeisawesome
This is groundbreaking - and the very fact that it is possible, is mind-
bending... I really liked the possibility that these 'machines' can be
'evolved' into agglomerating ocean microplastics into collectable balls!

