Harvard built It. DARPA paid for it. Nobody governs it.

 Scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have created something that did not exist six weeks ago: a tiny living robot with a functional nervous system that it built itself. No plug. No battery. No remote control. The little creature swims, explores its environment, and responds to drugs the way a nervous system is supposed to respond — because it has one. They call it a neurobot. To understand what that means, a bit of context is necessary, because this creature has been decades in the making.

It started in 2020, when the same Wyss Institute team created xenobots — tiny spherical structures assembled from the embryonic skin cells of Xenopus laevis, the African clawed frog, a species that has been a laboratory workhorse for decades. Cut a small piece of tissue from a frog embryo, drop it in a dish, and something strange happens. The cells don't die. They heal themselves into a sphere, sprout hair-like projections called cilia across their surface, and start moving through water — with no scaffold, no genetic manipulation, and no instructions from anyone. Just cells doing what cells apparently do when removed from the body they were meant to build and then are left alone. ...<<<Read More>>>...