#bioengineering

#bioengineering

We've already seen a full season of Amazon Prime Video's hit series, and while so much of the post-apocalyptic video game is accurately depicted without directly adapting, there's one element that hasn't popped up yet: deathclaws, the ultra-powerful monsters that appear over and over in Fallout games, much to players' chagrin. Not much is known about these mutated lizard monsters, but Fallout Season 2 finally revealed a key part of their backstories - and it goes back even further than fans first thought.

Think of them like pesky little genomic robots that hijack our biology to replicate, since they don't generate their own energy and can't reproduce on their own. They aren't made of cells, and are driven by a ruthless set of programmed instructions to multiply at all costs. Since their genomes are pretty simple, they're easier to tinker with and less ambitious for a human or machine to recreate. Remember: a genome is the DNA in an organism, not just a few strands.

Imaging revealed a distinct space between the implant and the bone, suggesting that the implant had been integrated through soft tissue rather than the traditional fusion with the bone.

Typically, people think about robots as devices that you build with plastic and metal and the wires and software. But because fruit flies are so well understood, they can be treated as living robots.