51–60 of 133 posts
15 mins of human labor per test doesn't sound cheap but I guess you can get the patient to do it themselves. A bit curious, why is a cheap centrifuge hard to build? It seems like a pretty simple device and motors are pretty cheap.
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We used it to demonstrate centrifugal forces in elementary school by spinning one and putting drops of food coloring in the center. They were made of lightly-waxed parchment paper so you could see a trail it left behind as it got flung off. I'm just surprised it took this long. That particular lesson was... 26 years ago for me.
Well why didn't you tell the world about this 26 years ago. Heck, why didn't you tell the world 2 days ago?
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Well why didn't you tell the world about this 26 years ago. Heck, why didn't you tell the world 2 days ago?
Then, much like now, I'm too busy with minerals and the inordinate amounts of money people will pay for them.
Cool idea but it can't possibly be safe to spin infected blood on a device such as this.
Re-inventing a 5000-year-old toy is genius? H'okay......
If you can find a way to make pick-up-sticks into a seawater desalinator, I'll bet you could get a nice article written up about you too.
I know that when I centrifuge something delicate, even having even a very light magnetic force brake on the centrifuge on can screw up the pellet at the bottom. Rapidly changing the g-force direction like this seems like the worst case scenario.
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yes i have a better solution - kill one of those multibillion military projects and redirect the money to buy lifesaving medical equipment to the places that need it. equip research facilities with equipment and provide local training. paper centrifuge? its like a slap on the face.
Those expensive medical machines require a lot of infrastructure to operate properly. You could get a machine there, but you likely couldn't provide it clean and reliable power without additional equipment and technicians to maintain it. Bootstrapping infrastructure is stupendously hard and expensive (and is a huge measure of a country's wealth - a lot of the US wealth is tied up in structural infrastructure like pow…
Cool idea but it can't possibly be safe to spin infected blood on a device such as this.
Why not? The videos show the devices being operated with one handle fixed against a wall/door. In that situation, nothing flying off the disc will go towards the operator. You could also enclosing it in a box or operate it inside a hole in the ground.
At the low end and low RPMs all you need is some string and some paper. At moderate RPMs you could use (scavenge, even) off the shelf components to achieve your aims. For instance, how fast could you spin a bicycle wheel under human power before the system becomes dangerous?
From memory, an unbalanced bicycle wheel doesn't become noticeable to the rider (whose weight is holding the wheel down) until somewhere around 20 mph. A fair quality wheel doesn't get scary until about 25, but if you want to run down a valley or mountain road with your hands off the brakes (35+), you need the sort of quality that gives the lay person sticker shock.
Now, a wheel mounted to a block of wood doesn't have 150 lbs of anchoring it in place, but that's not the only device with bearings that can be located.
Hell, a washer with a broken water pump could work, if you knew how to rig it.