Microfluidic Chips Made With Shrinky Dinks 149
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:Sometimes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Somethings tapping at the back of her head (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sometimes people get butt-hurt. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who knows anything about
Women can laugh at penis jokes too, ya know.
Misogyny it aint.
Funding? (Score:1, Insightful)
how is it a troll? (Score:3, Insightful)
thus a silly throw away joke. exactly how humor deprived are you?
Clueless in Tagland (Score:0, Insightful)
Coming Soon: advanced inks and printers (Score:4, Insightful)
I know nothing about this area of science, but holy cow! This simple technique already seems to accomplish so much, and to be so useful. Think what it will be when they've created advanced inks and molding materials to create smoother "walls" and which let you control the "shrink" factor more precisely! Imagine specially designed printers to enable chip printing-- even if it's just a more precise tray to hold the shrinky dink media.
This is terribly exciting. It puts microfluidic experimentation within the reach of any hobbyist, college class, or high school! Great breakthroughs will come of this, I just know it.