A device that took top prize in a competition to reinvent the chemistry kit combines a computer chip with a more retro component: a punch card, much like the ones used to program the earliest computers. The chip is covered in tiny pumps, valves and pipes that, based on the commands given by the punch card, combine small amounts of chemicals in different ways to carry out experiments.

“All you need is to punch a series of holes (or just copy somebody’s else protocol) in a piece of paper, insert the paper tape and roll the hand crank,” Stanford assistant professor and kit co-creator Manu Prakash said in a release. “It requires zero electrical power, is extremely low-cost, robust, completely self-contained and can run an arbitrarily complex protocol with no danger of chemical exposure to the operator.”

The Punch-card Programmable Microfluidics chemistry kit. Photo courtesy of George Korir.

The ability…