Sometimes it's the little things that lead to big things and a Stanford bioengineer's innovative chemistry set is a perfect example.
Manu Prakash wants young students to explore when it comes to science and decided to "reimagine" the chemistry set for the 21st century.
So he looked around for some inspiration and there it was: a small music box his wife had received as a holiday gift.
According to a Stanford announcement, Prakas played with the music box and got the idea that the rotating pins could be used to pump fluids through tiny channels or to control valves and droplet generators in a programmable fashion.
"Punch-card paper tapes like this have been used to program computers and fabric looms, so why not chemistry?" he said.
The prototype features a hand-cranked wheel and paper tape with periodic holes punched by the user. When a pin encounters a hole in the tape it flips and activates a pump that releases a single drop from a channel. In the simplest design, 15 independent pumps, valves and droplet generators can all be controlled simultaneously.
When all was said and developed, the kit ended up costing $5. His kit won him $50,000 after being entered in the Science Play and Research Kit Competition (SPARK), jointly sponsored by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Society for Science & the Public.
"In one part of our lab we've been focusing on frugal science and democratizing scientific tools to get them out to people around the world who will use them," Prakash said.
"I'd started thinking about this connection between science education and global health. The things that you make for kids to explore science are also exactly the kind of things that you need in the field because they need to be robust and they need to be highly versatile."
Prakash hopes his kit can prove useful in many ways, from stirring students' interest in science to improving global health.
"The things that you make for kids to explore science are also exactly the kind of things that you need in the field because they need to be robust and they need to be highly versatile."
