in the shell

The first step in making a bioroid is to make a biological circuit. That has now been achieved. There are many, many more steps, but this is the first one.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... onics.html

Very cool!!! You know, there always seem to be really cool tech things happening that, unfortunately, we never hear about again. Hopefully this one just builds and builds.

--Jeff

I'm trying to figure out what a bioroid is... the wikipedia article was helpful, but I pose this question to you:

in battlestar galactica, were the human cylons bioroid? or were they "just" clones?

In BG I'd say they were both engineered AND clones.

They certainly had a number of features that standard humans do not (extra strength, that communal mind thing, being able to connect to a computer by sticking a wire under their skin - so presumably they can also control their own pain response) so in that sense they are robots. Although the labor expected of them was information management and subterfuge rather than construction or armed intervention (they are too soft and gooey for the latter)

But I'd say that once you have a template made and the prototype is successful, then the manufacture of a biological robot would be much more like cloning than mechanical assembly.

Why didn't the "final five" just clone themselves or at least duplicate their own programming? They obviously did good mechanical work, but the psyche they programmed into most of the skin jobs was certainly defective.