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These are not your typical circuits. Pressurized fluids, not electrons, run through them; the pathways are made of rubbery silicone, not rigid silicon; and the on-off controls are valves, not logic gates.
These fluid-routing circuits are the building blocks for a new breed of microchips based on the fledgling technology known as microfluidics - the manipulation of minute quantities of fluids in tiny channels, and all the minuscule plumbing it takes to do that.
Created by a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and his associates, the microchips have passages the width of a human hair. The silicone pathways are honeycombed with individual chambers, each about the size of a few human cells, within which chemical reactions can take place.
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