Quite fortunately, the IUCN currently lists the marvelous Black Rain Frog as a Species of Least Concern.
It can also, however, fold its legs up under its body at will. Its ability to puff its body up to several times its normal size easily ranks high among these.
This fascinating species further remains very well known for several unique physical characteristics. The scientific name for the amazing animal, meanwhile, is that of the hard to somewhat pronounce Breviceps fuscus. These alternate names for the creature include such terms as the plain rain frog, brown short-headed frog, and the Tsitsikama frog. Each of these, in turn, remain comparatively descriptive, though. It also, however, also goes by several other common names. The distinctive term of Black Rain Frog serves as one of the common names for a remarkable variety of amphibian. Prof Mark Miodownik, the director of the Institute of Making at University College London, welcomed the research, saying it was “amazing science and another step closer to animate materials”. In the long-term, biobots made from our own cells could even be used in the body to remove the need for surgery, said Bongard. “These are very small, biodegradable and biocompatible machines, and they’re perfectly happy in freshwater,” he said, adding that near-term applications could include collecting microplastics from waterways. Using artificial intelligence, the researchers found that if the xenobots were formed into certain shapes, such as that of the video game character Pac-Man, replication continued for further generations.īongard said the hope was that self-replicating machines could eventually be developed to do useful work, with the team’s computer simulations suggesting the xenobots could fix electrical circuits. But the children are too small and weak to make grandchildren,” said Bongard. “It turns out that these xenobots will replicate once, one generation, they will make children. The team found that as the cells are sticky, they can – if a pile is large enough – form a new, moving cluster over five days: a child xenobot.īut there is a hitch. “ move around in the dish in this corkscrew pattern and they crash into other loose cells, and sort of just smush and push them ,” Bongardsaid. The team made their discovery by watching the actions of xenobots in petri dishes containing room-temperature pondwater and loose cells from frog embryos. But we don’t know whether this form of replication, which we now see in groups of cells, played a role in the life’s origins,” Bongard said. “Kinematic self-replication in molecules was definitely important at the start of life on Earth. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bongard and colleagues report that xenobots take a very different approach called kinematic self-replication – a process previously seen for molecules but not organisms. 
But plants and animals have previously been found to do this by reproduction – mechanisms that range from the asexual process of budding to giving birth. Anything that makes a copy of itself can be said to replicate, Bongard noted. One of those ways is the production of offspring.
And they look and act in ways very different from normal frog,” he said. “They definitely do not grow into frogs, they actually keep the form that we impose on them. Bongard said the xenobots in the current study could propel themselves around using hair-like projections called cilia. Xenobots have no digestive system or neurons, and naturally fall apart after about two weeks. Xenobots were first announced last year, and are what are known as “living robots”– synthetic lifeforms made by taking a few thousand cells from frog embryos and assembling them into clusters about 1mm in size. “These things move around in the dish and make copies of themselves,” said Prof Josh Bongard, of the University of Vermont, a co-author of the research.
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