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Japan team creates world's first "crab computer"

Wouldn't your latest generation tablet be way cooler if it ran on live crabs? Thanks to Yukio-Pegio Gunji and his team at Japan’s Kobe University, the era of crab computing is upon us ... well, sort of. The scientists have exploited the natural behavior of soldier crabs to design and build logic gates - the most basic components of an analogue computer. They may not be as compact as more conventional computers, but crab computers are certainly much more fun to watch. Electricity and microcircuits aren’t the only way to build a computer. In fact, electronic computers are a relatively recent invention. The first true computers of the 19th and early 20th centuries were built out of gears and cams and over the years many other computers have forsaken electronics for marbles, air, water, DNA molecules and even slime mold to crunch numbers. Compared to the slime mold, though, making a computer out of live crabs seems downright conservative. The scientists at Kobe university didn’t just p