"These are reagents. This is dispensation. This is a mixing or combining. This is an incubation." Joe Duncan is telling me what the symbols on the screen represent.

It looks like a few icons linked together on the screen, but it's a lot more than that. It's a visual computer language to design experiments, to visually represent every step, every detail in a process and save a detailed log of everything that happens.

Duncan's company, TeraNode, is developing the software through grants from NIH, the National Science Foundation and Intel.

The design can be used as a guide, or the software can combine with robotics, wireless technology and artificial intelligence to run an experiment automatically. Duncan showed me a video produced by Intel:

"This is a researcher who has designed a procedure using this visual language. In the laboratory, the system automatically recognizes her. She scans reagents. It recognizes the reagents she's using, fills that in. There's a chip on this pipetter. Using wireless, it will automatically record the amount of liquid that she puts into the pipette, and it will record that automatically as she does the work."

Researchers no longer have to depend on their notes or "understandings" about how something is done. This software eliminates ambiguity and should make it easier for someone else to replicate an experiment.

Obvious users for software like this, drug companies. "Languages like this can help refine the design of experiments that can discover drug targets with very high volume experiments, that you can try many more possibilities much more quickly than in the past when things were done manually," says Duncan.

The software, called TeraLab, replaces handwritten notes, and provides a visual, formalized experiment that can be shared as an email attachment. The "person at the other location opens up the attachment and can see exactly what my plan was, and then run it, and they could, in theory, run it at their locations and ship me the results via email."

Looking even farther down the technology road, experiments could be networked, the results at certain points in one experiment used to change what happens in another. What's in this for the consumer? Duncan says we may find software like this for our kitchens. "As kitchens become more advanced, as appliances can respond to computer instructions, if you had your favorite recipe and you had expressed it in this language, you could actually have the stove turn itself on when the right time comes, and set itself to a certain temperature, stay at that temperature for a certain number of minutes, change temperature automatically, things like that."

Teranode expect to commercialize its software late this year. Duncan says several drug companies are already using the software as part of a pilot project.