‘We’re very good at anthropomorphising things.’ Plus, how to slash both dependence on Russian fuel and greenhouse-gas emissions. And visit ‘cloud labs’, where robots do the research.
Credit: Emerald Cloud LabCloud labs enable scientists to perform wet-laboratory experiments remotely in an automated research environment. The work is done by machines run by lines of code issued by researchers around the world, aided by a few human technicians. It’s not cheap, but it can save money compared with buying the equipment yourself, and.
“I cannot remember how many times I’ve read something in a paper, tried to do it and, not surprisingly, it didn’t work. But in a cloud lab, if I just copy and paste my experiment, it will work again,” says chemist Dmytro Kolodieznyi. He replicated several years of his PhD research in just one week while testing out the capabilities of one such lab, where he now works.