Researchers with IBM and Polytechnique Montréal “fold” a drop of water, solving a problem that has hindered development of portable diagnostic systems

October 9, 2019

Montréal – If you’ve ever stopped to watch rain falling on a windowpane, you’ve seen what happens when two drops of water touch and merge into one. But you probably never imagined that the physics at work in this phenomenon was the key to unlocking a solution for the development of miniaturized personal biological analysis devices. An international team of scientists from IBM Research – Zurich and the Microfluidics for Oncology Laboratory at Polytechnique Montréal made this remarkable discovery, and recently published the results of their work in Nature.