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Microfluidics: Miniature Chemistry Labs

Posted by michael on from the make-jello-using-one-third-vodka dept.

enkidu writes: "The NYTimes has a story (free reg, yaba yaba) about the rapidly emerging field of microfluidics and describes some of the methods used in making micro-valves, pumps and other components. In the future, you won't need to send your blood/urine sample to a lab, your doctor will put in his "lab-in-a-box" and hand you a printout before your leave."

5 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Daily drug screenings! Yay! by 13013dobbs · · Score: 2, Interesting

    *sigh* Now it will be easier for employers/cops/whoever to scan people for evil drugs.

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  2. On the hardware side... by danamania · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I wonder if this could be a useful thing in cooling circuitry such as CPU's. Build a cooling system into the CPU itself. perhaps an ultra-efficient heatsink which pumps liquids through tiny channels in thin fins - anything to help heat dissipation.

    ...or combine the medical side of it and pump your own body fluids through your cpu - ooah. scary.

    1. Re:On the hardware side... by rgmoore · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Unlikely. The flow that you can get through a very small channel is absolutely tiny. Over a large range, the backpressure goes up as one over the square of cross-sectional area, so a large array of small channels can allow substantially less flow at a given pressure drop than a single large channel of the same area. Using channels the size that you can make using this kind of process you simply aren't going to be able to get enough flow to make much difference.

      (BTW, I do have some idea of what I'm talking about; I've worked in microfluidics and still work in a closely related field.)

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  3. Won't this hurt accuracy? by diamond0 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Due to the small samples such a machine would process, the error margin is bound to be huge. This is elementary statistics, folks; if you want milligrams per deciliter of blood cholesterol, or any sort of statistic about a body fluid, the more of a sample available to the process, the more accurate it's going to be. Compare this to Nielsen surveying only twenty people, or Gallup only a hundred.

    I've been wrong before; maybe a biochemist could chime in and let us know how much blood or urine constitutes a true statistical sample?

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    1. Re:Won't this hurt accuracy? by danamania · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I posed this question to a friend who does work with testing body fluids in a lab, and her response was that since there -are- minimum sample sizes, one small test on a tiny scale could certainly have errors on a different scale to current tests.

      My guess is by looking at the relative complexity (in number of components) of the pumps/mixers/detectors compared with a several hundred million transistor CPU, that an array of perhaps millions of separate testers could be easily built, one which would run millions of simultaneous tests.

      Only comparing those results with known working ones would show if the results were comparable - certainly one more type of testing can't hurt, and if it only proves extra accuracy in a few cases, they may be ones with a great impact.