Moving water is fairly straightforward on the human scale: a pump or a bucket will usually do the trick. But in the last couple of decades, various teams have begun to study ways of moving liquids around on the much smaller scale of micrometres.
Their goal is to create devices, such as a lab-on-a-chip, that can carry out self-contained chemical and biological tests on tiny samples. To that end, researchers have developed various new ways to move liquid around using exotic pumps relying on things like electric fields. So-called microfluidic devices are having a big impact in areas from pathogen identification to environmental monitoring
Last year, Steve Arscott at the The University of Lille in France added another tool to this armoury. He showed that light could modify the wetting angle of a conducting droplet sitting on an insulated conductor.
via technology review
January 18, 2012
