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Salad Spinner Made Into Life-Saving Centrifuge
lucidkoan writes "Two Rice University students have transformed a simple salad spinner into an electricity-free centrifuge that can be used to diagnose diseases on the cheap. Created by Lauren Theis and Lila Kerr, the ingenious DIY centrifuge is cobbled together using a salad spinner, some plastic lids, combs, yogurt containers, and a hot glue gun. The simple and easily-replicated design could be an invaluable tool for clinics in the developing world, enabling them to separate blood to detect diseases like anemia without electricity."
No kidding. What's next? Ox-powered cars? Have we forgotten that centrifuges predate electric motors?
Not to nitpick, but I just can't help myself. This device can actually spin 30 tubes, not 1. So, 7.5x more than a manual centrifuge. I'll give you the other points, but I am genuinely curious as to how important sanitation is in this context. The stated use case is checking for anemia in undeveloped countries, how necessary is sanitizing the centrifuge for that?