In January of 2020, scientists from the University of Vermont announced they had built the first living robots; this week they have published reports that those robots, made from frog cells and called Xenobots, can reproduce and have found a new way to do so.

The millimetre-sized xenobots are essentially a computer-designed collection of around 3,000 cells. They were created by taking stem cells from frog embryos, scraping them, leaving them to incubate, then cutting them open and sculpting them into specific shapes. After all that action, the cells began to work on their own – auto-repairing when sliced and moving about inside petri dishes.

With a little design tweak, the creatures could do even more. “With the right design, they will spontaneously self-replicate,” said University of Vermont researcher Joshua Bongard, Ph.D. in a canned statement.