Inspired by water-walking insects, scientists have built liquid robots that work autonomously and continuously without the need for electrical inputs, transporting chemicals back and forth while partially submerged in solution. The "liquibot" technology may lead to further developments in automated chemical synthesis or drug delivery systems for pharmaceuticals, say the researchers, including those from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US. Earlier studies had demonstrated the working of liquibots that autonomously perform a task, but just once, and some that can perform a task continuously, but need electricity to do so continuously. In the new research, published in the journal Nature Chemistry, scientists demonstrated the first self-powered liquid robot – which look like little open sacks just 2mm in diameter – that can run continuously on energy from the chemicals in its surroundings instead of electricity. "We have broken a barrier in designing a liquid robotic system that can operate autonomously by using chemistry to control an object's buoyancy," study co-author Tom Russell from Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division said in a statement.

In a potential breakthrough for regenerative medicine, scientists have created the first-ever living robots that can reproduce. The millimetre-sized living machines, called Xenobots 3.0, are neither traditional robots nor a species of animal, but living, programmable organisms. Made from frog cells, the computer-designed organisms, created by a US team, gather single cells inside a Pac-Man-shaped'mouth' and release'babies' that look and move like their parents. Self-replicating living bio-robots could enable more direct, personalised drug treatment for traumatic injury, birth defects, cancer, ageing and more. Xenobots 3.0 can gather hundreds of single cells, compress them and assemble them into'babies' released from their Pac-Man-shaped mouths Xenobots are neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal, but a living, programmable organism.

Previous articles have detailed the ways in which they represent the next great leap in computer technology, allowing the possibility of things like vastly improved machine learning, artificial intelligence, and a number of other things straight out of science fiction. The problem has always been building them, but one major breakthrough just made getting there much easier. But to begin, you need to understand a bit about how quantum computers work. Now, research published in Science Advances details the creation of the first quantum Fredkin gate, a key component in making the quantum circuits that are required for quantum computers. Researchers from Griffith University and the University of Queensland used linear optics to perform the first demonstration of the quantum Fredkin gate. The Fredkin gate, or the controlled swap gate, is a three-qubit gate where, depending on the state of the control qubit, the quantum states of the two target qubits are swapped.The Fredkin gate typically requires a circuit of five logic operations to be implemented.