At Stanford, brain surgery is a task that can now be delegated to the robots—at least when it comes to fruit fly research.
A high-speed robot designed to be an automated lab assistant can study as many 1000 flies in a 10-hour period, a group of Stanford roboticists and biologists report in the journal NatureMethods. Rather than employing grad students with tweezers to determine gender, measure size, and perform brain surgery on fruit flies—one of the most popular model organisms for biology and medicine—a $5000 robot can do it.
via Mental Floss
