AI-Powered Robots Are Now Cloning Pigs All By Themselves

Us neither, but a bunch of robots can apparently now lay claim to the accolade thanks to researchers from the University of Nankai in Tianjin, China, who created an AI-powered system to direct the service. Because by taking humans (we squishy, fallible humans) out of the equation, the team behind the autonomous pig-producing tech have reduced the margin for error. South China Morning Post reports that the switch to AI-powered robots has improved the success rate of cloning pigs, something that's practiced for research and agricultural reasons. The subsequent piglets are the world's first to have been produced entirely by robots. In 2017, the same university created piglet clones from robots, but humans had to jump in for a delicate step involving removing the egg cell's nucleus. When cloning an animal, a viable egg cell's nucleus needs to be removed so that a somatic cell nucleus can be put in its place.