Much of the global population most susceptible to devastating disease is also susceptible to inadequate medical care. Some of the limitations to medicine involve the dependence of modern medicine on technologies including electricity. How can key diagnostics like centrifugal sample separation and light microscopy be done without electricity?
The brilliant team in Manu Prakash's lab at Stanford has invented several inexpensive, lightweight, and electricity-independent tools to make modern diagnostics accessible to populations with little or no industrialized infrastructure.
For example, the paperfuge enables rural medicine by leveraging a millennia-old toy technology by which a disc is spun. When thin tubes of blood samples are mounted on a disc of paper and spun (fast!), the different materials of blood separate according to their density and the portion containing malaria parasites can be observed (with a foldscope!) even when present at very low levels, accelerating diagnosis and treatment.
In developing the paperfuge, the Prakash lab not only created the tool, but they also uncovered and documented its underlying physics: the strings that spin the central paper disc supercoil.
Wired Magazine picked up this story! Even more fun than reading the general-audience press is seeing the instrument in action via a movie on YouTube.