{"id":3463,"date":"2017-01-13T12:34:26","date_gmt":"2017-01-13T11:34:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/?p=3463"},"modified":"2017-01-13T12:57:28","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T11:57:28","slug":"spinning-toy-reinvented-as-low-tech-centrifuge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/2017\/01\/spinning-toy-reinvented-as-low-tech-centrifuge.html","title":{"rendered":"Spinning Toy Reinvented as Low-tech Centrifuge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/low-tech-centrifuge.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3464\" src=\"http:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/low-tech-centrifuge-500x282.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/low-tech-centrifuge-500x282.jpg 500w, https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/low-tech-centrifuge.jpg 630w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Growing up in India, Manu Prakash entertained himself with a bottle cap that spun around on two strings that he tugged with his fingers. As a physical biologist at Stanford University in California, he is now transforming that simple toy, called a whirligig, into a cheap tool to help diagnose diseases such as malaria.<\/p>\n<p>Other researchers have come up with low-tech, inexpensive centrifuges that used salad spinners3 and egg beaters4, but these devices could manage only around 1,200 rotations per minute (r.p.m.) and took too long to process samples, says Prakash.<\/p>\n<p>Hoping to do better, his team went on a shopping spree to a toy store, collecting spinning gizmos and filming them with a high-speed camera. Yo-yos spun too slowly (and required training to use). But whirligigs were both easy to operate and reached speeds of 10,000 r.p.m., comparable to a commercial centrifuge.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/spinning-toy-reinvented-as-low-tech-centrifuge-1.21273?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20170112&amp;spMailingID=53183839&amp;spUserID=MTc2Njg4Nzk3OAS2&amp;spJobID=1082216099&amp;spReportId=MTA4MjIxNjA5OQS2\">See &amp; read more at Nature<\/a>. Thanks to Rodger Kram &amp; Austin Liu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Growing up in India, Manu Prakash entertained himself with a bottle cap that spun around on two strings that he tugged with his fingers. As a physical biologist at Stanford University in California, he is now transforming that simple toy, called a whirligig, into a cheap tool to help diagnose diseases such as malaria. Other [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[185],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3463"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3473,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463\/revisions\/3473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}