This robot is an amoeba robot.

It's from a genus called Pachysoma.

You group similar species into a genus.

And we're finding amoebas like this. This is the amoeba dubia.

The earliest members of our lineage, the genus Homo, were darkly pigmented.

These are two shots of a red tide coming on shore here and a bacteria in the genus vibrio, which includes the genus that has cholera in it.

It may turn out to be something that looks a little like that amoeba.

This is a different species in the same genus but exactly the same foraging behavior.

Maybe I can group species into other categories. And that's where we get the genus from.

Just as in the case of star formation here in galaxy formation, genus length or genus mass are key concept to determine the scale of fluctuations that can actually grow or fragment in the smaller one.

If you look at the hexagon, for instance, it's like an amoeba, which is constantly changing its own profile.

There are 13 species in the genus, and they have a particular behavior that I think you will find interesting.

We started off as a teeny, teeny little one celled amoeba, tiny, just sticking onto a rock, and now, voila, the brain.

And then he went even beyond that, because even the idea of grouping things into a genus dated back to the ancient Greeks.

We also have been working with some scientists and engineers from UPenn to come up with a chemically actuated version of this amoeba robot.

And the amoeba dubia doesn't look like much, except that each of you has about 3.2 billion letters, which is what makes you you, as far as gene code inside each of your cells, and this little amoeba which, you know, sits in water in hundreds and millions and billions, turns out to have 620 billion base pairs of gene code inside.

This animal is the size of a paramecium and an amoeba, and it has a brain of 7,000 neurons that's so small you know these things called cell bodies you've been hearing about, where the nucleus of the neuron is?