The annals of horror include more than a few tales of mad science. Some are fictional; others are not.
To begin with, scientists created life, again:
Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and self-heal.
Then that life created a new way to reproduce itself:
the xenobots, which were initially sphere-shaped and made from around 3,000 cells, could replicate. But it happened rarely and only in specific circumstances. The xenobots used "kinetic replication" -- a process that is known to occur at the molecular level but has never been observed before at the scale of whole cells or organisms...
Download Xenobotsparentrotatingalargeballofstemcells
Naturally science took a hand:
With the help of artificial intelligence, the researchers then tested billions of body shapes to make the xenobots more effective at this type of replication. The supercomputer came up with a C-shape that resembled Pac-Man, the 1980s video game. They found it was able to find tiny stem cells in a petri dish, gather hundreds of them inside its mouth, and a few days later the bundle of cells became new xenobots.
We can leave the possibilities to the reader's imagination. Well, with this extra detail: "The research was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency."
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