Mega-Micro-Fluidics

Worth it for the picture alone:

Which looks like some sort of beautiful deep-see worm from The Abyss, or a fascimile of one of those weird Chinese dogs that mad old ladies have made out of space-age medical equipment.

It is, a microfluidic chip capable of performing 1024 (or is that 1023?) experiments at the same time. Brilliant.

There’s been a lot of talk on the DIYbio list about Sharpie-Microfluidics (“Sharpie” being American for “pen”, or maybe “one of those felt-tipped pens with the pointy ends”, but to me it sounds Australian, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The Australians have a take on the English language that is disarmmingly direct, and I love it dearly

And I digress – apparently you can draw the microfluidic shape you want directly onto glass and it behaves just like a mega-bucks version.

Maybe there should be a word for the conversion of high-science to low (or at least, more democratically-dispensed) science. De-sublimation. It’s like turning gold into lead, but in a good way.