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Digital Microfluidics
herrd0kt0r writes "A brilliant team of researches at Duke University have been working on digital microfluidics, with potential applications in biotech labs-on-a-chip, optical routers/switches, wavelength division multiplexers and the like. Essentially, this team has developed a solid state device capable of moving very small drops of fluid over very small distances with very little power. From their website they remark that "[m]icrofluidic processing is performed on unit-sized packets of fluid which are transported, stored, mixed, reacted, or analyzed in a discrete manner using a standard set of basic instructions."
Their site includes eight .mpgs demonstrating their microfluidics tech in real-time. Be sure to take a gander at this video showing programmable flow of droplets as well as this one showing droplet splitting and formation."
What good is the electric light. You need a gas light to see the dim glow!
Cars! You need a mechanic to ride along to keep it running. Just toys for rich playboys.
ATT gave up the right to enter the computer business in exchange for keeping the monopoly on phone service for a few more years. What possible use could there be for C & UNIX outside of a few research instituions?
IBM let the PC industry slip through their fingers because they viewed them as toys, nothing there that should distract them from their mainframe business.
I doubt that anybody will really know the answer to your question, no matter what it's asked about, except in hindsight.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
Some applications might be:
- chemical analyzers for bonb detection, drug detection, polutant detection, purity analysis, etc.
- hydraulic applications such as you see in full scale in real life (a nano bulldozer, heh)
- steam engine applications maybe? Turn that AMD heat pig of yours into a small, closed-system electical generator
Anyway, I'm sure there are many more potential applications, but you get the idea.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
W00t! No more pipetting.
This has some very useful applications. I work in a genetics lab doing a lot of molecular biology work with primate genomes.
It's still a needle in a haystack issue. We deal with nanograms of DNA suspended in microliters of liquids. The microliter is pretty much the limit of what we can manually manipulate, anything less and it gets damn expensive. As it is, there's a lot of suspending, centrifuging, and shaking going on in the lab; a lot of work and time to manipulate a very small amount of material.
If I could just load my sample onto a microfluidics device and 'manipulate' everything by executing commands, life would be much easier. You'd probably avoid a lot of loss and contamination issues with this type of technology. The amounts of expensive reagents used could be reduced significantly. It'd be like a tiny tiny molecular biology lab in a box.
Those are just some of the research possiblities. I'm sure you could have a 'farm' of these microfluidics devices to do production level work.
-- "Sucks to your ass-mar"
A while back Slashdot ran a story aout micro engines. If I recall correctly werent they having probles with fluid aka fuel flowing through those little suckers due to them being small etc etc dont have time to go back and read it work soon. Anyways maybe these two techs can be combied if they can make it small enough to run on the micro engines. My 2 cents.