{"id":846,"date":"2015-08-20T22:06:08","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T22:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cmed.lab.mcgill.ca\/?p=846"},"modified":"2016-01-15T15:20:01","modified_gmt":"2016-01-15T15:20:01","slug":"sweet-candy-based-micromanufacturing-of-soft-materials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moraeslab.com\/cmed\/sweet-candy-based-micromanufacturing-of-soft-materials\/","title":{"rendered":"Sweet!  Candy-based micromanufacturing of soft materials"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What started out as a disastrous experiment to make hand-pulled cotton candy in Chris&#8217; kitchen turned into a pretty sweet technique to microfabricate structures in\u00a0really soft silicone materials (published in <a href=\"http:\/\/pubs.rsc.org\/en\/Content\/ArticleLanding\/2015\/LC\/c5lc00722d\" target=\"_blank\">Lab on a Chip<\/a> last week). \u00a0Generating structures in materials that have the consistency of watered-down pudding is particularly challenging, as peeling away a mold tends to destroy the structures. \u00a0While experimenting with candy-making, instead of creating delectable, delicate and light\u00a0sugar structures, Chris ended up with a hard lump of sugar\u00a0that tasted horrible &#8211; but seemed to hold the microscale\u00a0features of his Ziploc plastic container\u00a0rather well. \u00a0He raced that lump down to the lab, and after some modifications, found that (a) designer\u00a0hard candies\u00a0can hold microscale features, (b) that PDMS can be cast and cured against the candy,\u00a0and (c)\u00a0the candy could be gently removed by dissolving away in warm water. \u00a0We then used microengineered soft molded structures to measure contraction of engineered microtissues, as a simple demonstration of this fabrication technology. \u00a0Seems quite promising for many applications in soft matter engineering, and as an added bonus, the lab smells *<strong>delicious<\/strong>*.<\/p>\n<p>[UPDATE: \u00a0lots of news coverage on this piece! \u00a0Check out the <a href=\"http:\/\/moraeslab.com\/cmed\/publications\/\">publications <\/a>page for links]<\/p>\n  <div class=\"otw-row\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What started out as a disastrous experiment to make hand-pulled cotton candy in Chris&#8217; kitchen turned into a pretty sweet technique to microfabricate structures in\u00a0really soft silicone materials (published in Lab on a Chip last week). \u00a0Generating structures in materials<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moraeslab.com\/cmed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moraeslab.com\/cmed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moraeslab.com\/cmed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moraeslab.com\/cmed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moraeslab.com\/cmed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=846"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/moraeslab.com\/cmed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":966,"href":"https:\/\/moraeslab.com\/cmed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions\/966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moraeslab.com\/cmed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moraeslab.com\/cmed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moraeslab.com\/cmed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}