New from the "Well, I See No Way This Could Go Wrong, Do You?" department, we have: some researchers who have built living things from stem cells that went on to discover how to reproduce themselves in a completely novel fashion.
A team of scientists at the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and Harvard University created what they call "xenobots" -- clusters of living stem cells taken from the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) that were on their way to becoming skin cells, but were excised and then arrayed in spherical clusters. These clusters began to reproduce, creating new clusters.
"Well, so what?" you may be saying. "Cells reproduce. It's one of the characteristics of life. What's so weird about that?"
What I haven't told you is that the clusters (1) reproduced not by mitosis, or at least not solely by mitosis -- they reproduced by scooping up loose cells in the petri dish and assembling them into new clusters; and (2) when the scientists noticed that the original clusters usually died after reproducing, they turned a supercomputer on the problem of whether it was possible to adjust the shape of the cluster to make it better at reproducing and more likely to survive -- and the model worked."[W]ith an artificial intelligence program working on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at UVM's Vermont Advanced Computing Core, an evolutionary algorithm was able to test billions of body shapes in simulation -- triangles, squares, pyramids, starfish -- to find ones that allowed the cells to be more effective at the motion-based 'kinematic' replication reported in the new research," said Sam Kriegman, lead author on the paper, which appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. "We asked the supercomputer at UVM to figure out how to adjust the shape of the initial parents, and the AI came up with some strange designs after months of chugging away, including one that resembled Pac-Man. It's very non-intuitive. It looks very simple, but it's not something a human engineer would come up with. Why one tiny mouth? Why not five? We sent the results to Doug [Blackiston, of Tufts University] and he built these Pac-Man-shaped parent xenobots. Then those parents built children, who built grandchildren, who built great-grandchildren, who built great-great-grandchildren."
It's astonishing to see what the universe looks like on scales different from those we're used to. The images of galaxies and quasars and (more recently) black holes are nothing short of awe-inspiring. However, the microscopic realm is equally breathtaking -- which you'll find out as soon as you open the new book Micro Life: Miracles of the Microscopic World.
Assembled by a team at DK Publishers and the Smithsonian Institution, Micro Life is a compendium of photographs and artwork depicting the world of the very small, from single-celled organisms to individual fungus spores to nerve cells to the facets of a butterfly's eye. Leafing through it generates a sense of wonder at the complexity of the microscopic, and its incredible beauty. If you are a biology enthusiast -- or are looking for a gift for a friend who is -- this lovely book is a sure-fire winner. You'll never look the same way at dust, pollen, algae, and a myriad of other things from the natural world that you thought you knew.
[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]