Inspired by a music box, Stanford bioengineer creates $5 chemistry set

Manu Prakash won a contest to develop the 21st-century chemistry set. His version, based on a toy music box, is small, robust, programmable and costs $5. It can inspire young scientists and also address developing-world problems such as water quality and health.

After talking with graduate student George Korir, Prakash started working with him on a way of pairing the hand-cranked toy with a small silicon chip containing tiny channels for manipulating fluids. These chips, called microfluidics chips, are increasingly common in research labs, but require expensive equipment and electricity to run. The expense and equipment required is a bottleneck in adapting the technology for science education and global health, Prakash said.

What Prakash and Korir invented is inexpensive, hand-powered, self-contained and programmable. "It's important to bring open-ended tools for discovery to a broad spectrum of users without dumbing down the tools," Prakash said.  read more: phys.org/news/2014-04-music-stanford-bioengineer-chemistry-video.html