Soft Hardware, Flowing Software: Reconfigurable Microfluidics for Adaptable Chemical Computation
Piet J. M. Swinkels, Brigitta Dúzs, Oliver Skarsetz, Kohei Nishiyama, Andreas Walther · 2026
Read Soft Hardware, Flowing Software: Reconfigurable Microfluidics for Adaptable Chemical Computation by Piet J. M. Swinkels, Brigitta Dúzs, Oliver Skarsetz, Kohei Nishiyama, Andreas Walther (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13361266.txt.
Description
Piet J M Swinkels and co-authors present a chemical computer you can rebuild on the fly in a 2026 paper. Chemical computing promises to process information where electronics cannot go, but most setups are frozen once built. The team printed soft gel walls inside a microfluidic chip and erased them at will. That makes the chip's shape itself a program the user can rewrite.
By reshaping the channels, they flipped DNA logic gates between AND and OR behavior. The chemical recipe stayed the same; only the layout changed. They also ran a restless reaction network that never settles, a step toward richer computing. Treating hardware as flowing as software could make chemical processors far more flexible and useful.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Piet J. M. Swinkels, Brigitta Dúzs, Oliver Skarsetz, Kohei Nishiyama, Andreas Walther |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 43938 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |