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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."
I get a Shrinky Dink when I go swimming :-(
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
When she started her job as a new professor at UC Merced, Michelle Khine was stuck without a clean room or semiconductor fabrication equipment
I hate when that happens.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
**WACK WACK WACK**
*obligitory family guy joke*
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/04/01/1526216.shtml
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Maybe this is why Shrinky Dink technology is getting popular with slashdotters. I also wonder what product names for commercial versions of Shrinky Dink processors would be.
Fact: On the 1st day, God created MACGYVER. On the 2nd day, God created knives and paperclips. On the 3rd day.. MACGYVER created everything else.
Fact: MACGYVER can invent 1000 different things using a ball of yarn and a pair of sunglasses. 999 of these things can kill a man. The remaining thing can kill a planet.
Fact: MACGYVER invented genocide using only blankets and smallpox.
Fact: The only thing that MACGYVER cannot produce with a soda can and an extension cord... is mercy.
Fact:One time, MACGYVER built a time machine out of an old refrigerator and a pocketwatch, and used it to travel to the ancient paradise of Atlantis. However, while there, he went on a drunken bender with with a magnifying glass and a book of matches. This area is now known as the Sahara.
Fact: Chuck Norris is an android built by MACGYVER in an attempt to find a worthy opponent.
Fact: Some crazy people claim that MACGYVER was just a TV character, played by Richard Dean Anderson. In actuality, Richard Dean Anderson was played by MACGYVER, and the show was a documentary, the events of which REALLY HAPPENED.
And the final Fact: Necessity is the mother of invention but... MACGYVER is the father.
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.
Shit, these headlines just write themselves.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
covered in greygoo created in someone's kitchen with toys from Matel?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
This professor, who also happens to be a woman,
Who cares if she is a man or a woman? She is a person, like the rest of us.
makes semi-conductors in her kitchen and all she gets is penis jokes?
And she didn't make semiconductors, she made microfluidic devices. Yes, she is brilliant, you apparently are not.
I'm not using microfluidic chips until they're immune to gravimetric distortions.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Actually, the most popular toy technology for
MACGYVER invented that list?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Does this mean that she enjoys watching her lab budget shrink?
this is the sort of thing that deserves patenting...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
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
You saw it here first folks, a new anonymous literary masterpiece born right here on the dot.
Sam ty sig.
that used fine grooved plastic(?) to combine methenol and vegetable oil to make pure bio diesel with out all the messy steps. I wonder if shrinky dinks would work to produce those same grooves?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Annealing with an EZ-Bake oven, followed by powder coating using perfume atomizers!
A former professor of mine works with lab on a chip stuff. She really stressed the point that computer and mathematical modelling is extremely important in engineering, particularly her research, because microfluidic chips are extremely expensive. I can't remember the exact number, but it was somewhere above $1000/chip.
Sure, the name "shrinky dinks" is funny, but being able to make these lab-on-a-chips affordably is a big deal.
RTFA.
Dammit...yeah, I'm new here.
If you'd just do what we tell you and quit yer gripin' everything would be chocolate sprinkles and rainbows! -AC
Now, who's the first to construct a DIY microfluidic NAND gate (or a more complex computation unit, such as a half or full adder) using the method described? Has somebody done so?
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
From the first link - http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12/macgyver-scienc.html
I think it was tagged such because that's what we nerds were thinking. A new way to construct microfluidic devices, huh? Well, can we send hamster ovaries through the channels?
I am hoping you're joking. Her favorite toy was the shrinky dinks, the list goes
1) her favorite toy
2) a laser printer
3) etc...
This is pretty neat.
As a kid I never understood the appeal of the Shrinky Dink as a toy. You draw on some plastic and then put it in the oven and it comes out smaller. Big whoop. Why not just draw it smaller to begin with.
But this is actually a functional (and cool technology) use/hack for the toy.
I tip my hat.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
Another of her colleagues managed to come up with a workable Supersymmetry model using a Pet Rock, a Toss Across, and a Slinky.
"Don't thank me... Thank the moon's gravitational pull..."
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I have an idea and can't afford a patent so I'm bugging manufacturers with my idea to sell it to them. First they sign the agreement. :)
Why should they get all the money?
I thought Schrodinger's cat was in Pandora's box !? Apparently the cat escaped by pushing the lid open.
Wanna bet she made light saber out of that very laser printer? Or an FTL drive?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
However this image:
http://www.rsc.org/ej/LC/2008/b711622e/b711622e-f4.gif
Is quite impressive. It is a excellent demonstration of what you can build with these channels. Quite cool.
Now where can I find a hand-held corona discharger?
Literacy? Ive hurd ov it.
I still get depressed every time I find a non-native English speaker that writes better than a native speaker. It happens more often than not, unfortunately. If you see a properly spelled and grammatically correct post on slashdot, I'd give you 2:1 odds that it wasn't posted by a native English speaker.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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.
Lab on a Chip
Chinese Hamster Ovary cells are used in several fields of cellular biology. They are often used in cancer research. They were cultured from the ovaries of female chinese hamsters (thus the name, sometimes biologists are not very imaginative when naming things). Just so you know, they are cultured cells, not the whole ovaries of hamsters.
I thought this year it would be:
radio controlled dragonflies
and radio controlled helicopters
Now, if they put a couple of wireless cameras into those, that would really cool.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
From what I've learned (yes they now teach patents in some research class here around), the application of a process is included in the patent application. If you invent a new application of an ancient method you could try to apply for a new patent (...now we found you can also do that with it...), as long as nobody has published about this new usage.
In this cases : Sorry, too late ! Prof. Khine has already published the paper, so there's no way Shrinky Dink's creator could patent a new use of their product.
Beside, as pointed out by other
Beside a patent is only useful if you want to sell your method to the industry. In this case the industry already has photo lithography, which isn't expensive for them given their production scales, so they don't really need the "kitchen"-made technique.
Probably for the same reason the not-wrong transparency film don't melt :
Shrinky dinks probably happen to tolerate higher thermal energy before starting to change shape.
I mean they are supposed to be cooked in an oven in order to shrink. Not just somewhat heated.
According to the paper, they cooked the plastic sheets for 5min at 163C in the ovens, in order to achieve the desired shrinking. Probably the couple of seconds the sheets spends in contact with the laser drum don't transfer enough thermal energy (besides, this article has also measured a lower temperature of 145 C, thus making the total heat exchange even lower inside the printer).
But probably, if there's a paper jam (or a plastic jam in this case) and the plastic sheets stay for several minutes against the heated drum, then probably you'll have to remove the jam using a magnifying glass and tweezers.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I was just reading the September issue of ACM Communications the other night and it covers, among other things, micro and nanofluidics. Michelle Khine has taken simple things and applied them to a complex problem. I salute you Michelle. Now, the next step might to be to see if the ink can be charged to create ion flow controls. But now I am stepping into areas I know little of (see my sig)
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
I read the title of the article, and thought "someone is going to tag this as 'shrinkydinks'". Sure enough, there it is.
Oh Slashdot, I can read you like a book.
The closest I could get was a scaled up version using packaging tape. Just a simple T-junction, but it was cheap. Pretty easy to set up, I used a tupperware lid with a layer of packaging tape cut with channels and covered by another layer. You could see the diffusion between chocolate milk and orange juice fairly clearly. Anyone else ever have success with one of these things or am I the only one to try?
Just for kicks, I clicked through your posts, all the way back to what started this. For this, I had to wade through 2 additional "I was unfairly modded down" posts before I got to the post you thought was modded unfairly. All I can say is... you deserved every last one of your troll ratings.
To wit:
1) There was no information of any kind in that initial post. Unless you count "You're stupid!" as informational.
2) It led off with a spelling correction. Spelling corrections, especially when used in the context of determining IQ, are karma killers. With good reason - they contribute nothing and are designed to insult.
3) You invoked group-think. Accusing nerds on Slashdot is like accusing cats of being herd animals - it flies in the face of observation. Not to mention that you conveniently accused everyone who disagreed with you of group-think. That indicates that it is merely a cop-out to avoid facing the fact that you're plain wrong.
4) You brought an entirely irrelevant fact into the discussion - the user's sig.
5) Finally, your solution to your perceived problem is idiotic. IQ has nothing to do with whether guidelines are read or even adhered to. I suspect that you think that's an appropriate solution just because you scored above 100 on some IQ test, and think that that makes you special.
Here's something else: my post should be modded to -1 for being off-topic. Do I care? No. Why? Because I know that:
1) Karma is just a number that means nothing - people modded me up when I was posting at 1, and people modded me up when I had been modded down to -1.
2) On average, I contribute more than I flame. I know that a -1 mod here and there does nothing to my Karma.
Here's a suggestion: realize that your initial post was completely and utterly useless, and mods were correct in telling you so. Realize that the only way out of Karma hell is to contribute useful commentary. I suggest to start by reading the article, providing links in your posts, avoiding insults, etc.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Big whoop because you are likely to make errors of about the same size regardless of how big you draw something, and when you shrink it the errors shrink too. It creates a small image that looks almost error free, even if you're fairly crappy at drawing.
I agree it's not that cool of a toy, but it does actually do something (somewhat) interesting.
I am not sure about the methanol, but if I remember the wikipedia article, you can use a vegetable oil ( like canola) and lye to yank the organic acid off the oil. What you are left with is a fuel ( an ester) that burns clean, and lots and lots of glycerol.
Apparently, the glycerol can be used to make urethane foam, for insulation - I still don't quite know how that is supposed to work.
The reactor that you remember I think I saw on slashdot; by using a huge number of capillary tubes, the reaction area was much larger, and the reaction could take place as the oil was being used.
The fluidic circuits thus formed might be a great topic for a science fair project ... Or the usual idea of idle amusement as held by the more hard-core slashdotters...
This is progress?
Yes! We must create an elite, segregated group of people who are deemed intelligent by a test and put them in power without a vote! It CAN'T fail!
nt = no text.
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
This gave me a brilliant idea! As many people cannot afford a genuine Segwey and are still to fat to actually walk for themselves, why not invent a budget Segwey that utilizes some good old school toy tech. Think of the great money savings that could be realized by tapping into the most trip proof nature of the Weeble in leu of expensive microprocessor controlled gyroscopes and such. I mean, the ride might be a bit wobbly, but it won't fall down. And in the spirit of childhoodiness, I would give the project a code name "SHHH...It's around the corner!"
whitesides (i think) was the first guy to go cheap by printing masks with consumer level printers, and making cheap masters for pdms molds
perhaps someone else can give a good summary and comparision
In the article, they note that rapid prototyping is simpler, more usefull and general tool, but that rapid prototyping machines cause upward of 50K
www.desktopfactory.com
these 3D printers - printers that print a layer of plastic, then another layer to make a solid 3 dimensional object - are just like other super high vol hardware: if it costs 5K this year, you will get 2X the performance for half the price next year - in 15 years, kids will come home from school and complain that there is no resin for the 3D pritner for their 5th grade social studies project, cause they need to make a 3D, realistic scaled model of , say an Aztec building (my kids are studying aztecs right now)
The cost of Shrinky Dinks just went up.
Seriously, if the manufacturer had known their product could be used for this type of work, the costs of Shrinky Dinks would never have been an affordable toy.
**WACK WACK WACK**
*obligitory family guy joke*
Truly, we have sunk that low.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
This kind of process seems perfectly suited to some kind of open source hardware design.
I wish I knew more about microfluidics. Does anyone know of some good examples of what microfluidic chips could be used for? I know they use them to save valuable reagents, or to create a more controlled environment for experiements, but how about some day to day applications?
I recall hearing a story on the radio recently about using microfluidic chips for detecting tuberculosis in the field. Essentially the chips could detect TB in a few minutes rather than the usual multiple day lab culture.
If something like that could be implemented using this process, I think it could be pretty revolutionary. Doctors could print out a shrinkydink TB detector mold and make detectors in response to an outbreak. That's got to be quicker and cheaper than having someone else make them.
....she should get an award or something. That's a fantastic synthesis of practical, proven tech to make something even MORE high tech (and expensive).
-Styopa
I agree that "I agree" / "I disagree" comment voting is a problem. My idea:
* Make it clear to meta-moderators that their job is to judge whether the moderation was based on quality, not on purely emotional agreeal.
* Give moderators the option to enter a short reason why the posting is of high/low quality. For example:
"-1, factually wrong: $person was born 1970, not 1986"
"+1, poster is clearly an expert on the subject"
"+1, well-reasoned argument that changed my view on the subject"
"+1, hot grits joke" (j/k)
(You might ask: "why not write a reply instead in these cases?"
A posting does not replace moderation; moderation scores are needed for filtering. Moderation reasons are also expected to be shorter. Maybe the reasons should be publicly visible (but not the moderator name - to prevent metamod abuse)).
* Make Overrated and Underrated metamoderatable. Moderators should give reasons like "the posting is not bad, but is not a +5 since these arguments have been said and answered many times and the user was apparently just upvoted because he sounds confident/smart".
Sure, this is not watertight; we can't expect moderators to write a paper on the subject to justify their vote. But I suppose that a large majority of the agreeal vorters would not bother to fake a reason and that's good enough. Meta-moderation would also be more fun. Your thoughts?
Medium cat is MEDIUM.
I wonder what she can do with
* Sea Monkies
* Pet Rock
* Spinart
Hey ! In fact that tends to prove my former hypothesis
High end color printers are single-pass multi-color.
In low cost color laser printers, the sheet of paper goes several separate time through the printer (similar to a "duplex" mode) the colors are applied in separate passes for Blank, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow.
In your case and with most fast laser printers (all those who have the same 20-something speed both in black-and-white AND color mode), the sheet of paper goes directly through the 4 colors cartridges directly in a line.
There is only 1 single pass and thus the plastic sheets receives the thermal energy from 4 fusers in a row, without a break between (not even a couple of seconds to cool off between separate color pass).
Probably your printer transferred too much thermal energy. Thus starting to induce the shape change. Which in turn cause the jam. Which in turn did happen next to the fuser. Which thus could transfer even more thermal energy, thus shrinking the sheet to tiny proportion by the time the technician could get it out.
Her printer was probably black-and-white (too lazy to read TFA again).
Also probably that the "Transparent media" setting they used caused the fuser to be set to heat even less. Maybe your printer had a similar "Transparent media" option to avoid burning the plastic. Did you get to experiment that too ? Or did your boss threaten to fire you if you continue goofing around with Shrinkies instead of working ?
(Also probably your printer works at blindingly fast speeds. Because a sheet of paper would spend shorter time in direct contact with the fuser, maybe the default temperature is even higher. And maybe that somewhat triggered the shrinking sooner than expected).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]