Microfluidic Chips Made With Shrinky Dinks

SoyChemist writes "When she started her job as a new professor at UC Merced, Michelle Khine was stuck without a clean room or semiconductor fabrication equipment, so she went MacGyver and started making Lab-on-a-Chip devices in her kitchen with Shrinky Dinks, a laser printer, and a toaster oven. She would print a negative image of the channels onto the polystyrene sheets and then shrink them with heat. The miniaturized pattern served as a perfect mold for forming rounded, narrow channels in PDMS — a clear, synthetic rubber."

Re:Clueless in Tagland

[Anonymous Coward]

From the first link - http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12/macgyver-scienc.html [wired.com]

In addition to making some simpler devices, Khine and her team emblazoned a Christmas tree design into a piece of PDMS and showed how it can blend different types of food coloring to make a rainbow pattern. Since microfluidic devices are sometimes used for biological research, the young professor also showed that Chinese Hamster Ovary cells can flow through through the narrow channels.

I think it was tagged such because that's what we nerds were thinking. A new way to construct microfluidic devices, huh? Well, can we send hamster ovaries through the channels?

Re:A Challenge.

[everphilski]

Microfluidic Logic Gates [rsc.org]

Link to Original Article

[Anonymous Coward]

Lab on a Chip [rsc.org]

Re:Clueless in Tagland

[Anonymous Coward]

Chinese Hamster Ovary cells are used in several fields of cellular biology. They are often used in cancer research. They were cultured from the ovaries of female chinese hamsters (thus the name, sometimes biologists are not very imaginative when naming things). Just so you know, they are cultured cells, not the whole ovaries of hamsters.

Karma Burn

[NeutronCowboy]

Just for kicks, I clicked through your posts, all the way back to what started this. For this, I had to wade through 2 additional "I was unfairly modded down" posts before I got to the post you thought was modded unfairly. All I can say is... you deserved every last one of your troll ratings.

To wit:
1) There was no information of any kind in that initial post. Unless you count "You're stupid!" as informational.
2) It led off with a spelling correction. Spelling corrections, especially when used in the context of determining IQ, are karma killers. With good reason - they contribute nothing and are designed to insult.
3) You invoked group-think. Accusing nerds on Slashdot is like accusing cats of being herd animals - it flies in the face of observation. Not to mention that you conveniently accused everyone who disagreed with you of group-think. That indicates that it is merely a cop-out to avoid facing the fact that you're plain wrong.
4) You brought an entirely irrelevant fact into the discussion - the user's sig.
5) Finally, your solution to your perceived problem is idiotic. IQ has nothing to do with whether guidelines are read or even adhered to. I suspect that you think that's an appropriate solution just because you scored above 100 on some IQ test, and think that that makes you special.

Here's something else: my post should be modded to -1 for being off-topic. Do I care? No. Why? Because I know that:
1) Karma is just a number that means nothing - people modded me up when I was posting at 1, and people modded me up when I had been modded down to -1.
2) On average, I contribute more than I flame. I know that a -1 mod here and there does nothing to my Karma.

Here's a suggestion: realize that your initial post was completely and utterly useless, and mods were correct in telling you so. Realize that the only way out of Karma hell is to contribute useful commentary. I suggest to start by reading the article, providing links in your posts, avoiding insults, etc.

messy Bio-diesel details

[JumpingBull]

I am not sure about the methanol, but if I remember the wikipedia article, you can use a vegetable oil ( like canola) and lye to yank the organic acid off the oil. What you are left with is a fuel ( an ester) that burns clean, and lots and lots of glycerol.

Apparently, the glycerol can be used to make urethane foam, for insulation - I still don't quite know how that is supposed to work.

The reactor that you remember I think I saw on slashdot; by using a huge number of capillary tubes, the reaction area was much larger, and the reaction could take place as the oil was being used.

The fluidic circuits thus formed might be a great topic for a science fair project ... Or the usual idea of idle amusement as held by the more hard-core slashdotters...