Category: Sentience in Manipulated Biological Substrates
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Living robots created as scientists turn frog cells into entirely new life-forms
Xenobots. Could self-replicating blissbots create a happiness explosion? Seen in The hedonistic Imperative “The world’s first living robots have been built using stem cells from frog embryos, in a strange machine-animal hybrid that scientists say is an ‘entirely new life-form.’” Read more
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Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
There was no evidence that the disembodied pig brains regained consciousness. However, in what Sestan termed a “mind-boggling” and “unexpected” result, billions of individual cells in the brains were found to be healthy and capable of normal activity. “These brains may be damaged, but if the cells are alive, it’s a living organ,” says Steve…
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Mini brains: Artificially Created Tiny Brain “Organoids” Show Signs of Neural Activity
The “mini brains” were technically “cerebral organoids,” made from the cells that make up the region of the brain known as the cerebellum. They started out as clusters of stem cells raised in a special medium designed to support brain development, eventually growing into organoids with a similar structure as a real-life cerebellum. Read more
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Organoids, chimeras and ex vivo tissues
“Organoid” is the term generally used to refer to a small ball of human cells grown in cell culture from stem cells (human stem cells for human organoids). The stem cells may be embryonic stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, or other types of stem cells, but the effort has been to get cells that…
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A biomaterial that arrange itself
“Using DASH, the Cornell engineers created a biomaterial that can autonomously emerge from its nanoscale building blocks and arrange itself – first into polymers and eventually mesoscale shapes. Starting from a 55-nucleotide base seed sequence, the DNA molecules were multiplied hundreds of thousands times, creating chains of repeating DNA a few millimeters in size. The…