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Living Robots Create Global Media Splash
New creatures, called “xenobots” were designed on a supercomputer at the University of Vermont by professor of computer science Joshua Bongard and his graduate student Sam Kriegman. Then biologists at Tufts University took the UVM designs and assembled them out of frog cells. The result was “a new class of artifact,” says Bongard, “a living, programmable organism"—that led to a scientific study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on January 13. And the other result was an avalanche of global media attention. Many hundreds (maybe thousands) of stories were published—from Boston to Beijing.