Lifeboat Foundation

In an effort to create robots capable of controlling their own life-cycles, researchers have developed squishy little devices that can melt themselves into a puddle of goo.

“We have mimicked death in a life cycle where the robot could end itself,” Seoul National University engineer Min-Ha Oh told Peter Grad at Tech Xplore.

This ‘death’ is triggered by internal ultraviolet LEDs that destabilize the chemical composition of the robot. This process takes about an hour though, so it’s likely we have a few decades before we’ll see robots being employed as the kinds of vanishing spies proposed by the researchers.