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Microfluidic Chips Made With Shrinky Dinks
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."
This gets modded funny? This professor, who also happens to be a woman, makes semi-conductors in her kitchen and all she gets is penis jokes? What she did was brilliant. How about a little appreciation of her ingenuity. I can feel the karma burn already.
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
Ironically, the sensitive guy act is a lot more likely to result in permanent virginity.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Oh come on... it's first post. At least it wasn't a soviet russia joke or something about women professor overlords.
/. knows the insightful posts always come in the 3-5 position... they take longer.
Anyone who knows anything about
Women can laugh at penis jokes too, ya know.
Misogyny it aint.
Does this mean that she enjoys watching her lab budget shrink?
story is about shrinky dinks. omg ponies is the same sort of little sister handicraft
thus a silly throw away joke. exactly how humor deprived are you?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Could someone explain what the tag "chinesehamsterovaries" might mean? And how it relates to this topic since that is the only story with that tag.
I can't explain it; this story made my day. Dupe or no dupe. Very cool.
I know nothing about this area of science, but holy cow! This simple technique already seems to accomplish so much, and to be so useful. Think what it will be when they've created advanced inks and molding materials to create smoother "walls" and which let you control the "shrink" factor more precisely! Imagine specially designed printers to enable chip printing-- even if it's just a more precise tray to hold the shrinky dink media.
This is terribly exciting. It puts microfluidic experimentation within the reach of any hobbyist, college class, or high school! Great breakthroughs will come of this, I just know it.