Lab-on-a-chip devices have been pursued for decades as smaller, cheaper and portable alternatives to manually doing routine biochemistry with clunky glassware. While some biochemical experiments have been miniaturised … most of these devices require much more equipment than just a chip. “You could hold the chip in your hand, and everything would be happening on that chip, but if you zoomed out, you would see a refrigerator-sized box that is controlling it. That’s not really lab-on-a-chip,” says Elliot Hui, [associate professor of biomedical engineering] at the University of California, Irvine. He and his colleagues set out to replace that huge box with a tiny computer that doesn’t need electricity and fits inside each lab-on-a-chip. Read More