A researcher preparing to perform an intraperitoneal injection on mice.Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket/Getty This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Animal testing has long been necessary for a drug to gain approval by the US Food and Drug Administration--but it may be on its way out. A new law seeks to replace some lab animal use with high-tech alternatives. The FDA Modernization Act 2.0, signed by President Biden at the end of December with widespread bipartisan support, ends a 1938 federal mandate that experimental drugs must be tested on animals before they are used in human clinical trials. While the law doesn't ban animal testing, it allows drugmakers to use other methods, such as microfluidic chips and miniature tissue models, which use human cells to mimic certain organ functions and structures.

AI-designed (C-shaped) organisms push loose stem cells (white) into piles as they move through their environment. To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses. Now scientists at the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction--and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, self-replicating living robots. The same team that built the first living robots ("Xenobots," assembled from frog cells--reported in 2020) has discovered that these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble "baby" Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped "mouth"--that, a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves.

A dozen organisms designed by artificial intelligence known as xenobots (C-shaped; beige) beside loose frog stem cells (white). A dozen organisms designed by artificial intelligence known as xenobots (C-shaped; beige) beside loose frog stem cells (white). Scientists say they've witnessed a never-before-seen type of replication in organic robots created in the lab using frog cells. Among other things, the findings could have implications for regenerative medicine. The discovery involves a xenobot – a simple, "programmable" organism that is created by assembling stem cells in a Petri dish -- and is described by a team of researchers from Tufts University, Harvard University and the University of Vermont in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Now scientists at the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction -- and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, self-replicating living robots. The same team that built the first living robots ("Xenobots," assembled from frog cells -- reported in 2020) has discovered that these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble "baby" Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped "mouth" -- that, a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves. And then these new Xenobots can go out, find cells, and build copies of themselves. "With the right design -- they will spontaneously self-replicate," says Joshua Bongard, Ph.D., a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research. The results of the new research were published November 29, 2021, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses. Now scientists at the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction--and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, self-replicating living robots. The same team that built the first living robots ("Xenobots," assembled from frog cells--reported in 2020) has discovered that these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble "baby" Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped "mouth"--that, a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves. And then these new Xenobots can go out, find cells, and build copies of themselves. "With the right design--they will spontaneously self-replicate," says Joshua Bongard, Ph.D., a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research.

A new COVID-19 diagnostic low-cost test now allows users to self-test for variants at home using a sample of their saliva. According to experts, the test could cost as low as $2. Scientists from Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and several Boston-area hospitals recently created the Minimally Instrumented SHERLOCK (miSHERLOCK) diagnostic test that gives users their results within 55 minutes. The CRISPR-based diagnostic test was designed to be able to distinguish between three different COVID-19 variants, including the highly contagious Delta strain. The test will only need a sample of the user's saliva. The results will then be sent to an accompanying smartphone app within an hour.

Swarm intelligence is a natural step in the evolution of certain social species. It explains why ants colonize, bees swarm, fish school and birds flock. Nature has proven that when individual creatures collaboratively work and think together as unified systems toward a common goal, they're more likely to reach that goal faster and more accurately than if they were to attempt it individually. In other words, they're smarter together than they are on their own. Swarm intelligence is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems (natural or artificial) that can maneuver quickly in a coordinated fashion. In nature, this closed-loop, collaborative behavior is unique within each species.

Minimally invasive surgeries in which surgeons gain access to internal tissues through natural orifices or small external excisions are common practice in medicine. They are performed for problems as diverse as delivering stents through catheters, treating abdominal complications, and performing transnasal operations at the skull base in patients with neurological conditions. The ends of devices for such surgeries are highly flexible (or "articulated") to enable the visualization and specific manipulation of the surgical site in the target tissue. In the case of energy-delivering devices that allow surgeons to cut or dry (desiccate) tissues, and stop internal bleeds (coagulate) deep inside the body, a heat-generating energy source is added to the end of the device. However, presently available energy sources delivered via a fiber or electrode, such as radio frequency currents, have to be brought close to the target site, which limits surgical precision and can cause unwanted burns in adjacent tissue sections and smoke development.

Schools of fish exhibit complex, synchronized behaviors that help them find food, migrate, and evade predators. No one fish or sub-group of fish coordinates these movements, nor do fish communicate with each other about what to do next. Rather, these collective behaviors emerge from so-called implicit coordination -- individual fish making decisions based on what they see their neighbors doing. This type of decentralized, autonomous self-organization and coordination has long fascinated scientists, especially in the field of robotics. Now, a team of researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed fish-inspired robots that can synchronize their movements like a real school of fish, without any external control.

Newly engineered slinky-like strain sensors for textiles and soft robotic systems survive the washing machine, cars and hammers. Think about your favorite t-shirt, the one you've worn a hundred times, and all the abuse you've put it through. You've washed it more times than you can remember, spilled on it, stretched it, crumbled it up, maybe even singed it leaning over the stove once. We put our clothes through a lot and if the smart textiles of the future are going to survive all that we throw at them, their components are going to need to be resilient. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed an ultra-sensitive, seriously resilient strain sensor that can be embedded in textiles and soft robotic systems. The research is published in Nature.