Research station only give you access to more technology not parallel research. For example, You build one research station you get access to tier 1 and 2 but not 3, 4, 5, and 6. You have to build more research station to gain tiers. Tier being the horizontal row from bottom to top. Research station give you 2 tiers. Any more question?

They used to allow pre-62 patch however as of 62 patch it has been this way since then look up this link.
62 patch notes link
Look at the top for the various patch notes.

I can't seem to find anything in the patch notes that directly refers to doing away with parallel research...the closest thing I found was:
"+Multiple Research Labs are needed to reach higher tiers of research."
But to me this is what you explained to the OP...that 4 research stations are needed to do research at the top two tiers. So wouldn't 8 stations provide two research streams each able to do research at the highest tier?

they took it out as with parallel research you could blaze through the tech tree very quickly and people complained about it being to fast so that was taken out to slow research down a bit.

yep thats what it seems like, as before, in a 90 minute game I had both tree's fully researched... now I usualy get about 1/2 way done with each in a 90 min game.

some of us are playing it on hard, and not easy like you ?

Children no fighting now or you'll be sent to bed without supper and no beta.   

Lordkosc do you call this bickering normal?
Me and Ninja bickering around

See what I meant Lordkosc?

Blair has confirmed that it was intentionally removed.

if everyone cannot complete their research in under an hour, and yet freak out about not having multiple researches going at once... that sends up red flags as to people's management abilities

hardly, my strategy works particularly well against early rushes. mostly because the enemy lacks differential capacity.

I guess I have posted my thoughts on the parallel research in another thread. I wouldn't mind the parallel research, as long as the cumulative time for all the parallel research is almost the same as the time needed to research all of them one after another. Meaning that if you distribute the research capabilities of your empire each research is proportionally slower.

I'd make parrallel research just a little bit faster than the sum of individual ones. Otherwise nobody would use it anyway - who would want to wait 5 times longer to receive 5 techs at the same time if he could have been using individual ones much sooner? A slightly shorter time would still make it a bit appealing for people who are at peace and like to gamble a bit. It gives you a slight technology edge on the war driven focused research.