That’s it, lab techs. Pack up your things, and get your recommendation letters ready. Time to take your proper place on the sidelines, as a robot named Adam has made us all obsolete.

The Robot Scientist project at Aberystwyth University made headlines today, bringing us the first machine to have independently “discovered new scientific knowledge”.

Adam formulates hypotheses about the origins of “orphan enzymes” (enzymes we haven’t yet associated with their genes). The robot then plans and executes experiments to test its (his?) own hypotheses (!), selecting yeast mutants from a collection, incubating cells, and measuring their growth rates.

As the team reported this week in Science, Adam came up with 20 hypotheses about genes encoding 13 enzymes, 12 of which it confirmed. This tedious and time-consuming work will hopefully free up the schedules of scientists, who will be able to spend more time thinking about the results procured by these robots.

Team leader Ross King pointed out that his robotic associate is able to express scientific findings in a clearer way than humans. “It expresses its conclusions in logic,” he said. “Human language, with all its nuances, may not be the best way to communicate scientific findings.”

Their super-interesting manuscript, published in Science, can be accessed here.

For those of you subscription-less science-pirates, it can be accessed free here. Shh. Enjoy.