The Paperfuge: A 20-Cent Device That Could Transform Health Care

THE LOOSE ASSEMBLAGE of paper and string Manu Prakash pulls from his pocket doesn’t look like much. And in a way, it’s not—just 20 cents’ worth of materials you can buy at an art supply store. But in another way, the Stanford bioengineer’s tangle of stuff is a minor miracle. Prakash calls it a Paperfuge, and like the piece of lab equipment it’s named for, the centrifuge, it can spin biological samples at thousands of revolutions per minute. That’s a critical step in the diagnosis of infections like malaria and HIV. But unlike a centrifuge, the Paperfuge doesn’t need electricity, complicated machinery, expensive replacement parts, or even much money to operate.

by (https://www.wired.com/2017/01/paperfuge-20-cent-device-transform-health-care/)