£100,000 'robot scientist' completes research project in THREE DAYS that would usually take months

A car factory robot, adapted by British scientists to work in a chemistry lab, completed an experiment in three days that would have taken a human months. University of Liverpool researchers reprogrammed the £100,000 autonomous arm, giving it enough intelligence that it can perform experiments without input. The robot is significantly more efficient, able to perform up to 700 experiments in a week - the same number a student might complete over the course of a PhD. It has already made a contribution to the Liverpool lab where it is based, working around the clock to complete 688 different experiments over 172 hours. The developers said the goal was to find a way to'automate the researcher' rather than the tools that scientists use to carry out experiments.