These living machines can grow, eat, move: Here's how
In robotics, you can make the impossible possible by leveraging the advancements in AI. There's potentially no limit to what you can do. And now, in one such example, scientists hailing from Cornell University have actually created machines that can live, grow, and evolve. They show common traits of life but are not truly 'living', at least not yet. Here are the exciting details.
DNA-based biomaterials created
The researchers, according to a report in The Next Web, have created DNA-based machines by encoding artificial metabolism and regeneration in a biomaterial. The material can crawl like a slime mold and grow new strands from the front after the ones at the back decay. Additionally, it can consume resources for energy (artificial metabolism), grow old and die.
Here's what researchers said about the function of these machines
These biomaterials represent a "combination of irreversible biosynthesis and dissipative assembly processes", the researchers behind the work claimed. "An emergent locomotion behavior resembling a slime mold was programmed with this material by using an abstract design model similar to mechanical systems."
How these machines work
The DNA-based biomaterial in question has been designed from nanoscale-sized building blocks that rearrange into minute polymers and large shapes. It develops from a base seed sequence, which enables the growth of newer strands when combined with a reaction solution, ScienceAlert reported. Essentially, the seed sequence provides the liquid flow of energy required to synthesize new strands in place of the decaying ones.
Now, this could be a step towards future
"We are not making something that's alive, but we are creating (artificial metabolism-powered) materials that are much more life-like than have ever been seen before," research member Dan Luo said, adding that every capability of the material is self-contained, with no outside interference. Evidently, creating materials with life-like characteristics like these could be the way to develop 'self-sustaining' artificial biological systems in the future.
Self-constructing, evolving machines on their way?
While this biomaterial is pretty primitive, it could lead to the development of robots that could construct, perhaps evolve or replicate, themselves. We know that is a very far fetched and scary guess but considering that life on Earth also started with a few kinds of molecules billions of years ago, this could be a real possibility.
