Outreach

This year we collaborate with Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek to demonstrate atherosclerosis-on-chip.  Dutch Design week is held between 22-30 October 2022. How does “design” change its meaning in functional (or a word that Piet prefers) and scientific perspectives? Throug...

Where life begins, the matter is structured at the micron scale by slotting every single molecule into its needful space. The molecules looped a bilipid membrane and nested more functional molecules inside, controlling the flows of energy in that smallest living cell. Every lo...

Creating a lab-on-chip device with multiple sensing capabilities has been a long-desired goal in the biotechnology field. A sensor-rich chip would pack the power of a full-scale laboratory as initially envisioned in the lab on a chip concept, yet it remained challenging for de...

Just another day at the chemistry lab. Get in, make sure to wear PPE thoroughly, grab a pipette set, start reading, and applying the steps of the experiment. Pipette hundreds of microliters of a solution, done. Pipette tens of microliters of another solution, no problems. Pipe...

The function of tissues degrade during the course of human life, whether the cause is genetics, accidents, or wear and tear. Frequently experienced medical conditions associated with aging include blocked arteries, cataracts, and arthritis. The former two can be thoroughly tre...

Our skin perspires every day by about 2.5 million sweat glands under the dermis layer. Not all the sweat glands have the same function. While some glands release sweat through the opening of hair follicles−aka apocrine glands−, some others open directly onto the...

A picoliter of a droplet is approximately 1 µm. It is so small that a raindrop can contain thousands of picoliters. Despite the small quantity, precise control of picoliter size liquids spawns a growing number of applications including in point-of-care tools and drug synthesis...

The boom in microfluidic total analysis systems is spurred by the use of microscale fabrication techniques. In 1999, Agilent Technologies introduced a coin-size device called “LabChip” to the market for the analysis of DNA. The timing of the market release of this device was r...

Mapping the human genome project has been one of the world’s largest scientific collaborations. Completing the full genome sequencing for “the book of life” took more than 10 years with the efforts of 1000’s scientists and a budget of $3 billion. About 20 years after the final...

Shale is a type of fine-grained rock that contains silt, clay, mineral particles, and pores ranging from meter to nanometer scales. The high organic material content in shale rock is used in natural gas extraction, for which shale reservoirs are mechanically stimulated to...

Even a tiny group of cells has the ability to populate a tumor in tissues. Determining cellular diversity and identifying these small cell groups gains importance when it comes to the selection of treatment strategies. Tissue samples taken from patients are required to be diss...

Mice, fruit fly, zebra fish easily come to mind when thinking of animal models for human physiology studies – but one animal is often forgotten, although it is as functional as the others. Have you guessed already? We are talking about soil-dwelling worms, aka C. elegans! Thes...

Cancer tumors are a lot more complex than we think: besides cancer cells, supportive tissue cells, fat, and even immune cells can be found in a tumor. Combined crosstalk in between these cell groups influences the way the tumor develops or responses to drug treatment. On the o...

Microparticles were first described in 1967 by Peter Wolf, a physician, as ‘minute particulate materials’ when he investigated the platelet activity in human plasma. They were initially used as drug delivery agents because their size is as small as pollens, which can easily go...

The human body consists of tens of trillions cells, all of which theoretically should have the same genome. Depending on genetic and environmental factors, some of these cells experience point mutations. Although most of those mutations are cleaned up by DNA repair enzymes, ab...

When cutting a finger, thrombocytes and fibrin in the blood make up the blood-clotting mechanism, aka. haemostasis, to stop the blood loss. Another way to trigger this mechanism is having an artery damaged by atherosclerosis, which is often caused by several genetic or acquire...

Like a ripple spreading outwards on a pond’s surface, a plasmon is a collective oscillation of free electrons in a piece of metal. When the metal interacts with light (in this case k vector of light satisfies the momentum condition), the collective movement of oscillating elec...

St. Paul’s Cathedral in London has its own unique acoustics. The architecture of the dome allows a whisper to be heard from anywhere within the circular gallery, so-called the whispering gallery. The invention of whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) biosensors is indeed derived by th...

Just like Google maps, DNA maps can tell us the distance between two genes, and allow us to zoom in on the region of interest. DNA mapping started with human genome project, where DNA sequencing techniques opened a way to unveil the genetic information. However, determining th...

You have worked hard all year and wanted to treat yourself with something different for the summer. You decided to arrange a journey to South-Africa to enjoy the beautiful natural scenery. Discovering the range of wildlife in immense national parks, hiking in mountains, and me...

The magic of magnetism can be shown through a simple classroom demonstration of bringing two magnetic pieces together and then trying to pull them apart. The attraction between the opposite poles of the magnets becomes very apparent as you struggle to tear them apart. This sim...

Iron deficiency anemia (IDA) is not a trivial illness. Every individual in the world’s population has the potential to suffer from this nutritional disease. According to estimations, 900 million people worldwide are already afflicted with it. IDA is known to lower cognitive ab...

From space shuttles to military equipment, or even the kitchenware that we use on daily basis, lasers have found use in more places than we often realise. Interestingly, the solid-state lasers were believed to be a solution to an unknown problem after their invention in 1950s....

Before the 1700’s, when dissection techniques were not yet available, the cause of mood changes were thought to be the replacement of liquids and vapors in the body. The biology of the brain has been better understood since the discovery of research and test tools. However, oc...

It takes about 14 years and 2 billion dollars to bring a successful drug from laboratory to clinic. A large portion of this time period includes in vitro culture tests, animal tests, and clinical trials. The overall success rate of a new drug molecule making it through this en...

Water is a simple element found in abundance throughout nature, and for many, its commonplace nature may mask its importance. Even a single droplet of water is of high value in the science world: when manipulated with sound waves, a water droplet can be used in a tremendous nu...