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posted by CoolHand on Thursday January 12 2017, @08:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the k-i-s-s dept.

From the paper in Nature Biomedical Engineering:

In a global-health context, commercial centrifuges are expensive, bulky and electricity-powered, and thus constitute a critical bottleneck in the development of decentralized, battery-free point-of-care diagnostic devices. Here, we report an ultralow-cost (20 cents), lightweight (2 g), human-powered paper centrifuge (which we name 'paperfuge') designed on the basis of a theoretical model inspired by the fundamental mechanics of an ancient whirligig (or buzzer toy; 3,300 BC). The paperfuge achieves speeds of 125,000 r.p.m. (and equivalent centrifugal forces of 30,000 g), with theoretical limits predicting 1,000,000 r.p.m. We demonstrate that the paperfuge can separate pure plasma from whole blood in less than 1.5 min, and isolate malaria parasites in 15 min. We also show that paperfuge-like centrifugal microfluidic devices can be made of polydimethylsiloxane, plastic and 3D-printed polymeric materials. Ultracheap, power-free centrifuges should open up opportunities for point-of-care diagnostics in resource-poor settings and for applications in science education and field ecology.

The lead inventor, Manu Prakash, is the recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant", and deservedly so. He also has an elegant portal web page on the Stanford site.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 13 2017, @04:56PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday January 13 2017, @04:56PM (#453363) Journal

    Several possibilities:

    1) Time travel.
    4) Hacked in to the author's computer, or computers belonging to Nature or the reviewers.
    2) Paid some Russian hackers to do that dirty work.
    8) Stole a prototype from the inventor's desk, with a robot arm attached to a drone that flew in an open window.
    5) Faked an earlier date, to win the patent.
    7) Spoofed the author with a fake website that looks just like Nature's, and passed the submission on a few days later.
    1) Threatened the author with lawsuits, to keep it quiet for a few weeks. Also did some insider trading with the knowledge.

    Or maybe just saw a preprint or came across the same idea, as it is at least 5300 years old.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @06:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @06:52PM (#453401)

    Or maybe just saw a preprint or came across the same idea, as it is at least 5300 years old.

    Well, yes, that was the sort of thing I was getting at. I was wondering if he saw this and thought "hey, it would be neat to model this up", but then I noticed that his uploads were much earlier than the online release of the paper which got me wondering where his interest in this comes from.

    Regardless, I'm still impressed with the modeling, printing, and putting it all together with a video. That's the kind of thing I would have been a little less surprised if it was one of the paper authors (or a related grad student) that did it.