I was happy to be invited for a keynote at the SDN Conference 2010 "Negotiating Futures - Design Fiction" last Friday. The topics from the whole day ranged from corporal designs and body upgrades to Einstein's genius and Design Theory/History...
First experiments are underway of using simple geometrical micro-chambers in PDMS to be able to sort and seperate motile whole organisms. At the moment the students of life science technologies, FHNW, are investigating the device shown above, which exhibits 3 different triangular filters with varying gate dimensions, using Anguilla Aceti (Nematode).
I finally got around to see my friend urs aka hugi to test his living-room laser cutter. nnnnnice.. the democratization of manufacturing has started, home-fabbing rocks!
so we tried to cut tape glued on top of microscopy slides, to be used as master for casting PDMS microchannels, see my article on homemade microfluidics, to be published in chips&tips. with these structures i will be able to do nice practical lab experiments on microfluidics with the students from FHNW.
more than that, of course we had the laser power all the way up, cos its fun, creates a lot of smoke and is spectacular to watch. and it seems the laser cut right into the glass slides.... hmmm that looked like fun. so we spent the rest of the evening carving our custom made microsocpy slides, see pictures below.
of course we didnt stop there and tested the laser micro-projector, see older post, and could beautifully project through the glass slides and get a nice, sharp and clear image of the dusjagr icon projected on our neighbors wall. hmmm that also looks quite interesting.
After intensive discussion, I came again to the conclusion, that allthough all Swiss Institutions offically accepted the Berlin Declaration, most individuals, outside the politically engaged groups, have no clue what it is all about and continue publishing in closed traditional journals and hide their educational lectures and content inside the cyber-walls of the universities. But there are changes visible, slowly, but there is hope...
Juuhuuu, my poster was awarded at the nanotech conference in montreux. in fact i am very happy that a scientific conference acknowledges also experiments that are being performed in the classroom. the poster described an ongoing teaching project i give at FHNW in a practical course in micro- and nanosystems for lifesciences.
