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Robo-scientist makes gene discovery--on its own

Leslie Katz | Apr 03, 2009

Adam (shown in background) may not look like its two colleagues in the white coats, but it's starting to act like them. (Credit: Aberystwyth University)

Earlier this week, we told you about a robot that could be controlled by human thought alone. Now comes news of a bot that doesn't need to bother with any human thought at all, thank you very much. It's a "robot scientist" that researchers believe to be the first machine to independently come up with new scientific findings. Aptly, the bot is named Adam.

While we've become accustomed to robots built to repeat a given task many times over, scientists at Aberystwyth University in Wales and the UK's University of Cambridge designed Adam to take a more human approach to scientific inquiry. And while it may not win the Nobel Prize for physics just yet, Adam appears to be doing impressively well for a young scientist, carrying out scientific research automatically, without the need for further human intervention.

As reported in the latest issue of the journal Science, Adam autonomously hypothesized that certain genes in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae code for enzymes that catalyze some of the microorganism's biochemical reactions. The yeast is noteworthy, as scientists use it to model more complex life systems.
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