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IATROGENIC INDUCTION. "One of the chief suspects for creating L-form bacteria in vivo is the use of antibiotics including the penicillins and the cephalosporins - and this is the method used to create L-forms in the laboratory." And given the over-use of antibiotics, they are likely everywhere. https://lnkd.in/dTCkxDw View in LinkedIn

ROBOTIC SAND. "Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model." And the whole thing could be recycled. https://lnkd.in/dm2MHH5 View in LinkedIn

ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANT. "Treatment with penicillin does not merely select for L-forms (which are penicillin resistant) but actually induces L-form growth." Given that they are microscopically invisible, and that they are induced by antibiotics, this makes their medical story very interesting. http://mpkb.org/home/pathogenesis/microbiota/lforms View in LinkedIn

BIG SMALL GOAL. "Shrinking the cubes remains the biggest challenge. Gilpin believes that they could eventually achieve dimensions of about 1 millimiter, in effect transforming their smart pebbles into smart sand, but that will take time." https://lnkd.in/dBu7JMS View in LinkedIn

SHAPE MORPHING. "L-form bacteria are pleomorphic, that is, they can change size and shape. During much of their lifetimes they are tiny, about 0.01 microns in diameter. Since they are smaller than viruses or fungal particles, they cannot be seen with a normal optical microscope. The small, individual forms of L-form bacteria are often referred to as coccoid bodies. Coccoid bodies sometimes group together, assuming the appearance of a string of pearls." http://mpkb.org/home/pathogenesis/microbiota/lforms View in LinkedIn

"A ROBOT SWARM is a self-organizing multi-robot system characterized by high redundancy. Robots’ sensing and communication capabilities are local and robots do not have access to global information. The collective behavior of the robot swarm emerges from the interactions of each individual robot with its peers and with the environment. Typically, a robot swarm is composed of homogeneous robots, although some examples of heterogeneous robot swarms do exist." http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Swarm_robotics View in LinkedIn

BIOINSPIRED KILOBITS. "Just as trillions of individual cells can assemble into an intelligent organism, or 1,000 starlings can form a great flowing murmuration across the sky, the Kilobots demonstrate how complexity can arise from very simple behaviors performed en masse." http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/08/the-1000-robot-swarm/ View in LinkedIn

SWARM INTELLIGENCE. "Smart module, or smart pebble, has only a small amount of processing power and memory, so individual modules cannot store a complete digital map of the object to be assembled. Each has to acquire only a certain amount of information, and by sharing pieces of data they must solve the problem collectively." https://lnkd.in/dBu7JMS View in LinkedIn

PRELUDE. Smart cubes are model systems to develop methods for much smaller scale units, such as Smart Sand. Progress on smart cubes has been significant, but ultimately, nanoscale structures and components will win the day. View in LinkedIn

SMART CUBES. "Each uses the momentum of flywheels spinning at up to 20,000 rotations per minute to roll over, climb on top of one another, and even leap through the air ... At the moment, the experimenters must provide the instructions for sticking together. Their plan, though, is to develop algorithms that allow the cubes themselves to decide when they need to hook up." https://lnkd.in/dzmMmjE View in LinkedIn