Free Republic

MIT has a new nylon-based artificial muscle-like filament created by researchers that could eventually provide the basis for robots with bulging biceps. The filaments themselves look eerily similar to the ones extruded by the 3D printers used in the opening sequence of HBO’s Westworld, which is why Gizmodo and others are seeing parallels between potential applications of the tech and Westworld‘s lifelike hosts. MIT’s new solution isn’t the first artificial muscle technology developed, but it is simple and low cost, unlike existing offerings. The researchers developing the tech found that specific types of nylon fiber can reproduce some of the...

Researchers fabricate biobots by growing living cells, usually from heart or skeletal muscle of rats or chickens, on scaffolds that are nontoxic to the cells. If the substrate is a polymer, the device created is a biohybrid robot — a hybrid between natural and human-made materials. If you just place cells on a molded skeleton without any guidance, they wind up in random orientations. That means when researchers apply electricity to make them move, the cells' contraction forces will be applied in all directions, making the device inefficient at best. So to better harness the cells' power, researchers turn to...

MIT engineers have developed biological computational circuits capable of both remembering and responding to sequential input data. The group's work, which is described in this week's issue of Science, (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6297/aad8559) represents a critical step in the progression of synthetic biology with the integration of DNA-based memory, in particular, pointing the way toward building large computational systems from biological components—computing devices that are living cells—and, ultimately, programming complex biological functions.