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."
I read somewhere about a process (Score:4, Interesting)
Saving a lot of money (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, the name "shrinky dinks" is funny, but being able to make these lab-on-a-chips affordably is a big deal.
Stupid Toy (Score:4, Interesting)
As a kid I never understood the appeal of the Shrinky Dink as a toy. You draw on some plastic and then put it in the oven and it comes out smaller. Big whoop. Why not just draw it smaller to begin with.
But this is actually a functional (and cool technology) use/hack for the toy.
I tip my hat.
Very cool article (Score:3, Interesting)
However this image:
http://www.rsc.org/ej/LC/2008/b711622e/b711622e-f4.gif [rsc.org]
Is quite impressive. It is a excellent demonstration of what you can build with these channels. Quite cool.
Now where can I find a hand-held corona discharger?
Re:patented I hope... (Score:3, Interesting)
What I want to know, is if Shrinky Dinks shrink when heated, why isn't fusing the toner to the Dink making it shrink? I mean, if you use the wrong transparency film in a laser printer, it MELTS and makes a horrible mess. Why aren't the Dinkys Shrinky?
Re:Somethings tapping at the back of her head (Score:3, Interesting)
radio controlled dragonflies [youtube.com]
and radio controlled helicopters [youtube.com]
Now, if they put a couple of wireless cameras into those, that would really cool.
Patents and absence of shrink in printer (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I've learned (yes they now teach patents in some research class here around), the application of a process is included in the patent application. If you invent a new application of an ancient method you could try to apply for a new patent (...now we found you can also do that with it...), as long as nobody has published about this new usage.
In this cases : Sorry, too late ! Prof. Khine has already published the paper, so there's no way Shrinky Dink's creator could patent a new use of their product.
Beside, as pointed out by other
Beside a patent is only useful if you want to sell your method to the industry. In this case the industry already has photo lithography, which isn't expensive for them given their production scales, so they don't really need the "kitchen"-made technique.
Probably for the same reason the not-wrong transparency film don't melt :
Shrinky dinks probably happen to tolerate higher thermal energy before starting to change shape.
I mean they are supposed to be cooked in an oven in order to shrink. Not just somewhat heated.
According to the paper, they cooked the plastic sheets for 5min at 163C in the ovens, in order to achieve the desired shrinking. Probably the couple of seconds the sheets spends in contact with the laser drum don't transfer enough thermal energy (besides, this article [fsnet.co.uk] has also measured a lower temperature of 145 C, thus making the total heat exchange even lower inside the printer).
But probably, if there's a paper jam (or a plastic jam in this case) and the plastic sheets stay for several minutes against the heated drum, then probably you'll have to remove the jam using a magnifying glass and tweezers.
Suggestions for more effective Meta-Moderation. (Score:4, Interesting)
* Make it clear to meta-moderators that their job is to judge whether the moderation was based on quality, not on purely emotional agreeal.
* Give moderators the option to enter a short reason why the posting is of high/low quality. For example:
"-1, factually wrong: $person was born 1970, not 1986"
"+1, poster is clearly an expert on the subject"
"+1, well-reasoned argument that changed my view on the subject"
"+1, hot grits joke" (j/k)
(You might ask: "why not write a reply instead in these cases?"
A posting does not replace moderation; moderation scores are needed for filtering. Moderation reasons are also expected to be shorter. Maybe the reasons should be publicly visible (but not the moderator name - to prevent metamod abuse)).
* Make Overrated and Underrated metamoderatable. Moderators should give reasons like "the posting is not bad, but is not a +5 since these arguments have been said and answered many times and the user was apparently just upvoted because he sounds confident/smart".
Sure, this is not watertight; we can't expect moderators to write a paper on the subject to justify their vote. But I suppose that a large majority of the agreeal vorters would not bother to fake a reason and that's good enough. Meta-moderation would also be more fun. Your thoughts?
Re:Karma Burn (Score:3, Interesting)