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    Robots are common in today's world. Theymanufacture cars, work in space, explore oceans,clean up oil spills and investigate dangerousenvironments. And now, scientists at the Universityof Manchester are using a robot as a laboratorypartner.

　　The researchers at the university created the robot in 2009 and named it Adam. Despite thename, Adam is not a humanoid robot. It is about the size of a car.

　　Adam was built to do science and make discoveries. Ross King is the leader of the University ofManchester research team. He says the robot made a discovery about yeast, a kind of fungusused in science as a model for human cells.

　　"Adam hypothesized certain functions of genes within yeast and experimentally tested thesehypothesizes and confirmed them. So it both hypothesized and confirmed new scientificknowledge."

　　Adam's success as a scientist led to the creation of another robot scientist named Eve.Researchers developed Eve to design and test drugs for tropical and neglected diseases. Thesediseases kill and infect millions of people each year.

　　Drug development is slow and costly. Experts say it can take more than 10 years and about $1billion to discover and develop new medicines. Drug manufacturers are unlikely to get theirinvestment money back.

　　So the University of Manchester developed a low-cost test that shows whether or not achemical is likely to be made into an effective medicine. Mr. King says that other drug testingmethods were not very effective.

　　"How it works conventionally is you use robotics as well and you have a large collection ofpossible drugs. You test every single compound. And you start at the beginning of your libraryand continue until the end, and stop. So it's not a very intelligent process. The roboticsdoesn't learn anything as it goes along, even if it's tested a million compounds, it still doesn'thave any expectation of what will happen next when it tests a new compound."

　　Mr. King says that Eve is different because the robot learns as it tests different compounds. Hesays the robot is designed to ignore compounds that it thinks unlikely to be good. It will onlytest the compounds which have a good chance of working.

　　Eve has discovered that a compound known to be effective against cancer might also be usedto fight against malaria and other tropical diseases.

　　Mr. King says he hopes to completely automate the drug testing process with robots like Eve tocreate and test new chemicals. But he says humans remain in control of the manufacturingprocess.

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