This Skate Taught Harvard to Build a Living Robot 🫀 — Transcript

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1. 0:00This tiny ray swims on living heart cells,
2. 0:03taken from a rat.
3. 0:04And its moves were copied from a real
4. 0:07fish. It started at the New England Aquarium.
5. 0:10Harvard bioengineer Kit Parker was there with his
6. 0:12daughter, Caroline. She leaned into the touch pool
7. 0:15to touch a stingray.
8. 0:17At the last second,
9. 0:18with one little flick,
10. 0:19it swerved away. Parker builds heart tissue for
11. 0:22a living. And he saw the same job
12. 0:24in both. A heart pushes fluid through itself.
13. 0:27A ray pushes itself through fluid.
14. 0:30He said the idea hit him like a
15. 0:31thunderbolt. To copy one,
16. 0:34his team picked a ray's cousin.
17. 0:36Meet the little skate.
18. 0:37It lives on the sandy seafloor of the
19. 0:39northwest Atlantic, from Canada down to North Carolina.
20. 0:43It's flat as a pancake,
21. 0:44and it glides through the water on two
22. 0:46wide fins. And it has no stinger.
23. 0:49It hatches from a leathery egg case called
24. 0:51a mermaid's purse, looking like a tiny adult.
25. 0:54And from day one,
26. 0:56it swims by rippling those fins.
27. 0:58Harvard fish biologist George Lauder's lab films how
28. 1:01skates swim. Light up the fin from the
29. 1:04side, and you can see it.
30. 1:05A wave rolls along the fin,
31. 1:07front to back. The muscles fire one after
32. 1:10another, and each push sends water backwards.
33. 1:13A skate's nervous system times that wave.
34. 1:15A sheet of heart cells has no brain
35. 1:17at all. So Sung-Jin Park built the timing
36. 1:20into the shape. He laid the muscle down
37. 1:22in zigzag lines. A pulse that starts at
38. 1:25the front has to snake its way back,
39. 1:27band after band. The ray is a tenth
40. 1:30the size of a skate,
41. 1:31sixteen millimetres long. A gold skeleton,
42. 1:35a silicone body, and about two hundred thousand
43. 1:37rat heart muscle cells grown onto it,
44. 1:40altered to fire when blue light hits them.
45. 1:42It's a robot with a pulse.
46. 1:44Now flash the front,
47. 1:46and watch the muscle.
48. 1:47The signal sweeps back along the zigzags.
49. 1:50The same wave as the skate's fin.
50. 1:52And the fins ripple,
51. 1:54and it swims. Fire all the muscle at
52. 1:56once instead, and it only manages half the
53. 1:59speed. Flash the two fins at different rhythms,
54. 2:02and it turns. The team steered it around
55. 2:04an obstacle course, fifteen times its own length.
56. 2:08It only lives in a warm bath of
57. 2:10salty, sugary liquid, and it held onto most
58. 2:12of its speed for up to six days.
59. 2:15It was never meant for the sea.
60. 2:17Parker's real goal is an artificial heart.
61. 2:20This ray, he said,
62. 2:21is a training exercise.
63. 2:23So the next time a ray flicks away
64. 2:25from your hand, remember,
65. 2:27somewhere in a lab,