Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) Most living organisms easily surpass machines when it comes to navigating real-world environments and adaptability to changing conditions. One way to bridge that gap is building biohybrid robots that merge synthetic machinery with biological components like animal muscles, bacteria, or plants. But living muscles are very hard to keep alive in a machine, bacteria have a very short lifespan, and plants tend to react to things a bit slowly, like Ents in The Lord of the Rings.