“LEGO already has millions of applications, building everything from castles to spaceships. But researchers in California have found a new use for the popular blocks – a modular microfluidics system. Microfluidics is a rapidly emerging technology with promising biomedical applications. It involves fluid manipulation at the microscale, where the fluid is usually set in motion by pressure regulators or syringe pumps. The researchers, from the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine, used polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) – a silicone-based organic polymer – to cast the building blocks of a truly LEGO-like microfluidics platform. They describe the results of their research today in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering (JMM).”