article_snippet: Professor Lee Cronin, regius chair of chemistry at the University of Glasgow who led the new research, used a robot to create tiny oil droplets from a mixture of four chemicals.
article_snippet: Each droplet was dropped into a petri dish of water and analysed for three different types of 'fitness' over the course of a minute using video cameras.
article_snippet: a robot then selected the droplet that performed best and the chemical composition of this was used to replicate the experiment, tweaking the mixture slightly each time.
article_snippet: Over the course of 21 generations, the oil droplets became more stable in the watery world in which the oil droplets were being dropped.