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Assembling a Micro-scale Biochemistry Lab Like Snapping LEGOs Together
An anonymous reader writes: Microfluidic systems promise to bring the same level of precision and control seen in the electronics industry to chemistry and the life sciences. Typically, devices are fabricated at substantial cost and using borrowed techniques from the semiconductor industry. Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have invented a system of discrete microfluidic elements akin to those found in electronic board design. It was inspired by the ease with which LEGO bricks are assembled into a larger structure, and finally allows for the rapid prototyping of "Lab-on-Chip" devices. The original paper is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
One of the articles was about fluidics, the pictures of plates of metal with holes, piled up and bolted together and doing logic operations with boiling liquids and what not.
That is not quite the same, since the goal was logic, rather than chemistry. Fluid/pneumatic logic was used in early embedded ICBM targeting and control systems, because it could withstand a thousand times as much radiation as an electronic circuit of that era.