While part of me immediately fears biological variation of the Iron Wind, I absolutely enjoyed the article. This is really what I come to HN for.

What did trouble me somewhat is the ending where the author effectively says, and I am paraphrasing, that bothering with ethics of it in a world, where we, as a species, demonstrably do not follow ethics is kinda silly ( he lists human designed pathogens as a way to substantiate it). I had trouble accepting that argument that despite knowing that factually he is correct.

edit: replaced true at the end with "factually he is correct"

So as I understand it, biologists and computer scientists take clumps of frog embryo cells and engineer their shapes to allow them to perform specific tasks?

Fascinating!

I wonder if they could use simple rules to get emergent behaviour like this: https://youtu.be/gaFKqOBTj9w

For a moment it got me thinking it was about these Xenobots,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dp6Rlf-2Wg

"All of which makes xenobots amazing and maybe slightly unsettling — golems dreamed in silicon and then written into flesh."

'Golem' is the right word. Something about seeing these artificial "organisms" thrash about bothers me.

This is groundbreaking - and the very fact that it is possible, is mind-bending... I really liked the possibility that these 'machines' can be 'evolved' into agglomerating ocean microplastics into collectable balls!