microfluidic
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Microfluidic sensor could spot life-threatening sepsis in minutes
Sepsis (where your immune system starts a chain of inflammation reactions) is potentially deadly, especially if septic shock leads your organs to fail, but diagnosing that in a timely fashion is still difficult or requires an unwieldy device. Thankfully, MIT researchers might have a way to identify sepsis before it's too late. They've designed a small microfluidic sensor that could detect sepsis in roughly 25 minutes, or enough time for doctors to start treatment. It might not look like much, but it promises far more sensitive detection than before.
Self-healing 3D-printed gel has a future in robots and medicine
Robots might be a little more appealing -- and more practical -- if they're not made of hard, cold metal or plastic, but of a softer material. Researcher at Brown University believe they've developed a new material that could be ideal for "soft robotics." It's already demonstrated that it can pick up small, delicate objects, and it could form customized microfluidic devices -- sometimes called "labs-on-a-chip" and used for things like spotting aggressive cancers and making life-saving drugs in the field.
Maze-like chip helps spot aggressive cancer cells
It's difficult to spot cancer cells -- just one in a billion blood cells are cancerous. How do you isolate them to know the trouble someone is facing and eventually treat it? By drawing the kind of mazes you enjoyed as a kid, apparently. Researchers have developed a microfluidic chip that uses a circular labyrinth to separate cancer cells from the rest of your bloodstream and spot the stem-like cells that will aggressively spread that cancer. Ultimately, it's a creative use of physics. The curves tend to push larger cancer cells forward (smaller regular cells cling to the walls), while the corners mix things up and put white blood cells in an ideal position.
Liquid-based watch tech is coming to more devices
If you're a fan of high-end watches and really want to stand out, one of your slicker options is HYT's H series. Instead of relying solely on spinning hands to tell the time, it uses a hydro-mechanical system that fills capillaries with fluid. Sounds niche? Well, it won't be for much longer: HYT and its sister brand Preciflex are receiving $23 million to fund not just more of these liquid-based watches (including at "different," likely more affordable prices), but to a "new type of fluidic jewelery." Preciflex has also been using it in the automotive and medical fields, too, so don't be surprised if you see the microfluidic tech grow there as well.
Morphing Braille tablets offer graphics to the blind
You can use voice dictation and feedback to navigate a phone or tablet if you're blind, but that doesn't really answer all your needs. What if you need to read charts or other graphics? The University of Michigan has an answer. It's developing a Braille display that uses microfluidic bubbles (filled with air or liquid) to produce the format's signature bumps on demand. Unlike existing Braille displays that rely on motors, this doesn't use up much space -- the school envisions mobile tablets that pop up dots whenever (and importantly, wherever) you need them.
Mini bioreactor makes life-saving drugs in the field
Paramedics and field medics can patch up some wounds on the spot, but they're usually stuck if they have to administer specialized drugs. What if you need medicine that health care workers don't have on hand? You might not have to rush back to the hospital in the future. Researchers have created tiny, microfluidic bioreactors that generate the proteins you need for medicine. At its heart are two very long (16 feet) channels wound into an extremely tight pattern, and divided by a customized, porous membrane -- one channel feeds chemicals, while the other hosts the reactions that produce your drug. You only have to shake the device to send protein from one side to the other and get the medicine you need.
UCSB sensor sniffs explosives through microfluidics, might replace Rover at the airport (video)
We're sure that most sniffer dogs would rather be playing fetch than hunting for bombs in luggage. If UC Santa Barbara has its way with a new sensor, those canines will have a lot more free time on their hands. The device manages a snout-like sensitivity by concentrating molecules in microfluidic channels whose nanoparticles boost any spectral signatures when they're hit by a laser spectrometer. Although the main technology fits into a small chip, it can detect vapors from explosives and other materials at a level of one part per billion or better; that's enough to put those pups out of work. To that end, the university is very much bent on commercializing its efforts and has already licensed the method to SpectraFluidics. We may see the technology first on the battlefield when the research involves funding from DARPA and the US Army, but it's no big stretch to imagine the sensor checking for drugs and explosives at the airport -- without ever needing a kibble break.
Jellyfish-mimicking device could snatch cancer cells right out of the bloodstream
If you think the picture above looks like droplets of blood being snared in a sticky tentacle, then you have a scarily active -- but in this case accurate -- imagination. It's actually a microfluidic chip that's been coated with long strands of DNA, which dangle down into the bloodstream and bind to any cancerous proteins floating past -- directly imitating the way a jellyfish scoops up grub in the ocean. If required, the chip can release these cells unharmed for later inspection. According to the chip's designers at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, the catch-and-release mechanism can be put to both diagnostic and therapeutic use in the fight against Big C, and can also be used to isolate good things, like fetal cells. The next step will be to test the device on humans -- at which point we may owe an even greater debt of gratitude to our gelatinous friends. [Image credit: Rohit Karnik and Suman Bose]
Harvard stores 704TB in a gram of DNA, may have us shopping for organically-grown storage (video)
Early research has had DNA making circuits and little factories. We haven't really seen DNA used as a storage medium, however, and it's evident we've been missing out. A Harvard team led by George Church, Sriram Kosuri and Yuan Gao can stuff 96 bits into a DNA strand by treating each base (A, C, G, T) as though it's a binary value. The genetic sequence is then synthesized by a microfluidic chip that matches up that sequence with its position in a relevant data set, even when all the DNA strands are out of order. The technique doesn't sound like much on its own, but the microscopic size amounts to a gigantic amount of information at a scale we can see: about 704TB of data fits into a cubic millimeter, or more than you'd get out of a few hundred hard drives. Caveats? The processing time is currently too slow for time-sensitive content, and cells with living DNA would destroy the strands too quickly to make them viable for anything more than just transfers. All the same, such density and a lifespan of eons could have us turning to DNA storage not just for personal backups, but for backing up humanity's collective knowledge. We're less ambitious -- we'd most like to know if we'll be buying organic hard drives alongside the fair trade coffee and locally-sourced fruit.
Portable device can sniff out anthrax in an hour, won't bring the noise
Got some mysterious white powder sitting on your coffee table? A new, suitcase-sized device can tell you whether you've got dandruff, or anthrax. Developed by researchers at Cornell and the University of Albany, the detector uses a microfluidic chip (pictured on the left) to collect and purify the DNA on a given sample, before conducting a series of polymerase chain reactions -- processes that can quickly identify biological materials. The machine, which has been in the works for seven years, is powerful enough to deliver test results in just one hour (requiring a sample of only 40 microscopic spores), but is slim enough to fit in an airline's overhead luggage bin. Scientists say their creation could also be catered to pick up on other pathogens, including salmonella, and may even pay dividends for crime scene investigators handling forensic evidence. No word yet on when the device could hit the market, but we won't touch an ounce of sugar until it does.
Scientists separate plasma from blood with working biochip
Disposable biotech sensors won't let you diagnose your own diseases quite yet, but we've taken the first step -- a research team spanning three universities has successfully prototyped a lab-on-a-chip. Called the Self-powered Integrated Microfluidic Blood Analysis System (or SIMBAS for short, thankfully), the device takes a single drop of blood and separates the cells from the plasma. There's no electricity, mechanics or chemical reactions needed here, just the work of gravity to pull the fluid through the tiny trenches and grooves, and it can take as little as ten minutes to produce a useful result. It's just the first of a projected series of devices to make malady detection fast, affordable and portable. Diagram after the break!
Microfluidic chip does 1,000 parallel chemical reactions, looks glorious
We'd never considered a career in biochemistry until we saw this wild beast of a chemical microprocessor. Microfluidic chips, used to test chemical reactions and properties, have been known to be smaller, but they've never before been quite this powerful. The result of a joint study between California State University, UCLA and China's Wuhan University, the "integrated microfluidic device" is capable of performing 1,024 in situ chemical reactions at a time, making the researcher's life, oh, about 1,024 times easier. Most importantly though, costly enzymes previously used for a single test can now be split up into hundreds and tested simultaneously, which should pave the way for exponentially faster and easier medical research. It's not clear when these will be widely available, but we're sure PhDs around the world are trying to order one as we speak.[Via medGadget]
Researchers in the Netherlands develop a microfluidic chip for testing drug reactions
Researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have developed an extremely small microfluidic chip that simulates chemical reactions commonplace in the human body, for testing drug reactions. The device is around a thousand times smaller than the usual electrochemical cell (the volume of the chip's main fluid channel is a mere 9.6 nanoliters) and uses electrodes to control the chemical reactions. It's already been used to conduct tests on Amodiaquine, an anti-malarial drug, with more studies sure to follow. While this is great news for medical science, we have to wonder what the small army of slackers, malingerers, and college students are going to do when they're no longer able to make money as human guinea pigs. Become bloggers?[Via PhysOrg]
Debiotech's insulin "Nanopump" delivers the good stuff, stays out of sight
Insulin pumps have come a long way in a few short years, all the way down to a pager-sized device diabetes patients can wear on a belt and keep out of sight for the most part, but Debiotech isn't content to stop there, and has teamed up with STMicroelectronics to bring a miniaturized insulin pump to market. The Nanopump is a disposable insulin pump, based on microfluidic MEMS tech (picture after the break), and is small enough to be worn as a nearly invisible patch on the skin, about 1/4 the size of existing pumps. The new partnership with ST brings this pump closer to the market, thanks to ST's silicon-based microfluidic manufacturing chops, and hopefully we should be seeing these not too long after the device clears regulatory hurdles, sans creepy butterfly.
Microfluidic computer runs on bubbles, deals in chemical analysis
Flipping over to alternate energy sources isn't just the rage in vehicles, as we've seen steam-powered and string-powered computers already, and now we're witnessing an oddity that's actually energized by bubbles. The "microfluidic" computer performs calculations by squeezing bubbles through tiny channels etched into a chip, and although it runs around 1,000 times slower than you're average desktop today and takes up quite a bit more room, no AC outlet is required to churn out chemical analysis. Manu Prakash and Neil Gershenfeld of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms created the devices by "etching channels about one micron wide into silicon, and then using nitrogen bubbles contained in water to represent bits of information flowing through these channels." The computer utilizes Boolean logic functions to carry out its work, and the researchers are already envisioning it carrying bubbles of molecules or individual cells to "conduct diagnostics or detect pathogens." We'll admit, a bubble-powered PC ain't too shabby, but even proponents fessed up that such a snail isn't putting modern day machine vendors out of business anytime soon.
