Stanford University
I find a fantastic connection between science education and global health
is the fact that you have you're forced to design robust tools for a 5 - 10 year old kid
and that's the exact same tools that might actually save somebody's life from a context of global health.
>>We have a device here which is the music box.
And how this works is the punch tape is run through the device.
We took this platform and looked at the gear pins and realized we could drive fluids with this.
With the presence of a hole, the gear-pin rotates and interfaces with the channel.
so as it turns it pushes the fluid forward.
>> So the idea is very simple. First of all, we build many different types of fluid chips.
This is a technology that has been around now for several years.
One of these chips essentially plugs into my punchcard tape
and what it enables suddenly is a way such that I can encode and run this punchcard tape.
It passes through the device, it reads all this information but implements that directly on the mechanism in the fluid channels.
So its essentially a new control mechanism that allows us to do fairly complex control strategy but all I need is just this
and not an entire lab.
Every time you punch a hole in this punchcard you get you get one single droplet coming out of the system.
This is almost like digitizing fluids just like in a computer you code and make all kinds of apps.
One of the things that would eventually end up happening is any number of chemistries can be ported to this simple platform.
>> For instance you test water quality and other applications including snake venom scripts or doing multiplex assays for medical diagnostics.
>> So this I believe is a very big thing. Version 0.1 and what it allows us to do is build on the complexity of this.
But at the same time keep these objects robust.
>>It's really democratizing chemistry and doing it without the need for all the infrastructure that's lacking in so many places in the world.
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