Recently the online magazine NewScientist published an article about a “Metal robot [that] can melt its way out of tight spaces to escape.” This sounds pretty amazing, but when you start to read into the article and watch the included video it becomes clear that the story is little more than clickbait.

The “robot” depicted is nothing more than combination of metals, mostly gallium that the scientists manipulate with a magnetic field. It’s an inert blob of material molded into the shape of a lego minifig, and that’s as close to a robot as it’s ever going to get. The article is clearly trying to relate to a certain movie about murderous cyborgs from the future. Don’t worry though, we’re not in any danger.

Calling this object a robot would be about the same as calling a ball bearing moved through a maze with a magnet, a maze-solving robot. The worst part of the video comes at the end when there’s a jump cut. We see it jump from the melted remains of the “robot” outside the cage and some bits still sticking to the bars of it’s cage where it passed through, to a fully re-formed figure standing in front of the cage.

They weren’t able to manipulate it into doing this, rather someone cleaned up the melted bits, shoved them back into the mold and reset the scene. If the material were to somehow be able to automatically return to it’s previous form that might be fairly innovative, but that’s not the case here. It’s simply a lump of metal with a low melting point that can be warmed up by current induced via magnetic fields penetrating it. (ie: inductive heating)

The definition of a robot is essentially an automated machine that can execute specific tasks with little or no human intervention. As much as the creators and writer want this to be a robot, it’s not.