From lab rats to robots

"WE ARE NOW in the parallel age," says Urban Liebel, a researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and one of the founders of Acquifer, a company set up to make robotic microscopes to improve the throughput of experiments that need to perform imaging. The microscope makes it possible to perform hundreds of drug tests on species such as zebrafish, which are widely used in biological research, and process the results automatically.