Scientists develop 'coin sorter' for nanoparticles, first-ever nanofluidic device with complex 3D surface
By Ross Miller 
posted April 5th 2009 2:09PM
posted April 5th 2009 2:09PM
[Via PhysOrg]
posted April 5th 2009 2:09PM
A look back on popular stories from today in a specific year.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
20 minutes and no comments? Well, this here proves exactly why apple is so much better than micro$oft!!!!
(maybe that'll get the comments going!)
HA i clicked on this post just to see what kind of people would comment on something so boring.
Definitely beats sorting by hand.
LOL, I am pretty tech and scientific savvy and i have no clue why Engadget felt that this was news that had to be reported. Slow day Engadget?
We can do whatever we want in these comments and no one will know!! No one's gonna click through on this article!
I'm pooping on the floor right now. Stop me, JoshTops! Too late! I'm gonna go call Ryan and tell him that you're not as fast as he was! He always stopped me from pooping on the floor! Step it up, JoshTops, step it up!
"Lilliputian chamber", love it.
"Potential uses"?!
"We are scientists, we make new stuff, and AFTER we think what we can do with it" right?
Well, sounds completely wrong to me. If a scientists have money but no goal, no project, no aim, then they're just spending money the way they like! Which is wrong, considering you didn't pay taxes for them to have fun, did you?
Undirected research has led to among over things penicillin and the smallpox vaccine. Don't second guess scientists, it's far too fashionable nowadays.
Can someone explain this post in mainstream words?
Thanks.
Microfluidics is a research field aiming to do things (usually) like perform liquid reactions on ultrasmall scales compared to traditional methods. In traditional experiments, one might add one liquid to another in a 'pot', mix it and took at the changes say to the spectrum of light that passes through. With Microfluidics we can do the same thing using an infinitesimal fraction of the usual liquid volumes, and observe fluids under much stricter flow conditions with better precision and control on contact times, heat exchange, diffusion rates etc. We can also do new things (as in this case) such as complex materials separation which help us investigate more accurately. For instance, I heard some researchers are able to isolate a single bacterial cell and monitor its unique condition, rather than sampling the average of millions of them. Furthermore, in the near future, mass fabrication of such microfluidic chips with highly parallel pipelines and even integrated detectors should massively speed up throughput.
Put simply, it should enable us to investigate 100's of more things at a time (particularly biological reactions), using 100's of time less material, with massive increases in accuracy. All in all, this should actually save money on important research (often relating to pharmaceutical development and discovery), leaving more money to do something else useful.
The barriers to this work however are that fluids don't behave at nanoscopic scales the same way they do at the scales we typically use everyday. In particular, it's actually very difficult to get things to mix, basically because there's no place for turbulence to fit. Also, the fabrication is difficult, as the manufacturing (typically adapted from silicon chip lithographic methodology) isn't very suited to the relatively large 3D shapes that are needed. This work shows how they've manufactured detailed 3D designs using a greyscale lithographic masking process rather than the usual all or nothing technique to create gradients in the depths of the channels.
@elmer:
...wat
@elmer
my brain hurts hurts so much i can't think of a witty response
I've been waiting for this for ages! I was going to get a Nintendo DSi, but I think I might get one of these instead.
The way the economy has been shrinking lately, I may need this to sort my nano-coins.
This should be fun.
You build one of these... being able to sort stuff in that size, great stuff. Then, you can add it to a nanomachine manufacturing unit once they have developed extruders and such... imagine a reprap the size of a pin head?
...upon reading this article...
...an intelligent person, if they didnt understand it...
...would look up the terms involved on wikipedia and try to get a grasp on it...
...an unintelligent person, posts a comment about how proud they are of being ignant lol omgz roflmao dssglksdgsga...
Engadget, most people are too stupid (me included) to understand these scientific breakthrougs and their implications, we are self-aware, but just barely :)
These scientists are crazy...why would you develop coin sorters for nanoparticles...it'll just slip right by...it's too large to sort those. What you need is a nanoparticle sorter. Coins just won't do it...that's like using net to catch rain water!
I love those new scientific discoveries... SWEET!
As a Biomedical Materials Science major, this is some great stuff! Micro-fluidics is such new field, that I think will have one of the greatest impacts on diagnostic medicine, equivalent to the introduction of antibiotics imho
I recall reading an article several days ago about a new breakthrough in the use of gold nanoparticles to treat cancer via laser radiation .. one of the drawbacks was that only a specific size of nanoparticle reacted in the correct way. With the way the nanoparticles are made, the size was very hard to control, so something like this could have some very beneficial uses (at least in the short term), and who knows how many other uses can be found for this sort of structure in the future?
That first image looks like a particle sorter I built in high school, although instead of nano-particles, it was for golf balls and pingpong balls, but it also basically consisted of an inclined plane, where particles ended up on either side at the bottom depending on weight.