January 12th, 2017
Centrifuges are universal machines routinely used in every lab in order to spin solutions at high speeds to separate liquids, such as blood, into different components. While they are easily available in developed countries, they are expensive and bulky to be used in developing countries, especially where stable electrical supply is a...
November 6th, 2012
New technology being developed by scientists in Norway may bring rapid blood testing directly to the bedside. The SpinChip, invented by Stig Morten Borch of Norway's SINTEF research center, uses a centrifuge to spin a small microfluidic chip that separates a blood sample into solid and liquid components that then undergo chemical...
November 9th, 2011Beckman Coulter, Inc from Orange County, CA, released its new Optima X product line of ultracentrifuges. They can run samples at a maximum speed of 100,000 RPM's and produce g-forces of 802,000 x g. The devices come with a large touch screen, viewable from across the lab, an intuitive graphical interface and multilingual software....
September 19th, 2011Beckman Coulter Inc., based in Orange County, Calif, announced its Allegra X-14 High-throughput centrifuge. It is a benchtop centrifuge witha fixed-angle rotor and provides a maximum speed of 10,200 rpm with 11,400 X g. Swinging-bucket rotors achieve a maximum speed of 4,300 rpm with a rcf of 4,300 X g. The machine can be loaded with a...
August 1st, 2011The centrifuge. Almost every medical research laboratory has one, and it is probably one of the most generally identifiable pieces of lab equipment. The fundamental theory behind a centrifuge is to spin a sample in a circular plane fast enough in order to separate the heavier constituents – whatever they may be – from the lighter...
August 6th, 2010
Everyone knows that if you hold and spin an object at the end of a string fast enough, the string will break, setting the object on a free trajectory. Switch the object for a baby in the womb and the string for the umbilical cord, and you've got yourself an idea for a patent. Oh, you must also go back in time to 1965 and have the mind...
May 5th, 2010
As part of a global health class at Rice University, students Lila Kerr and Lauren Theis decided to build a human-powered centrifuge that developing countries could build for around $30, made from a salad spinner and other cheap parts. Their assignment was to build a tool that could diagnose anemia without electricity and they came up...
May 22nd, 2008
Suzanne Nooij, a PhD student at Delft University of Technology in Holland, has been studying the causes of space sickness, or Space Adaptation Syndrome (SAS), that impacts many of the astronauts in their initial days in orbit.
Interestingly, SAS symptoms can even be experienced after lengthy exposure to high gravitational forces in a...
April 25th, 2006
With a maximum of 12.5 G's for human experiments (and 20 G's for those with bowels the size of soda straws), the 58-foot wide centrifuge, located at the Center for Gravitational Biology Research (CGBR) at Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, California), is being used to study how to minimize adverse effects of space travel on...
April 29th, 2005
NASA has a new tool to study the physiologic effects of microgravity:
For the first time, researchers will systematically study how artificial gravity may serve as a countermeasure to prolonged simulated weightlessness.
"The Vision for Space Exploration includes destinations beyond the moon," said Dr. Jeffrey Davis, director of JSC's...
April 11th, 2022
A team at Florida Atlantic University created a microfluidic chip that can sort and collect healthy sperm cells for fertility procedures. The chip takes advantage of the fact that healthy sperm will naturally swim against cervical mucus flows and uses fluid flow to guide the cells to swim into a collection chamber. The simple...
