A'cyber seed' that grows'like a plant' to design structures using material from the local environment has been developed by researchers. The'seed' is composed of hundreds of pieces of information, digitally encoded, that includes data on necessary materials, properties, and other parameters such as weight, height, colour, and density. Simple seeds could have 50 lines of information, with six pieces of information per line. This seed, algorithmically, then attempts to grow into a particular design set out by researchers from Queen's University Belfast, Loughborough University and the University of York. Starting off from a single cell in a CAD (computer-aided design) program, the seed will grow in a certain direction until it reaches the limit of the parameter it has been programmed with.

Human-level intelligence is familiar in biological "hardware" – it happens inside our skulls. Technology and science are now converging on a possible future where similar intelligence can be created in computers. While it is hard to predict when this will happen, some researchers suggest that human-level AI will be created within this century. Freed of biological constraints, such machines might become much more intelligent than humans. What would this mean for us?