How the World Flows: This book could convince you to become an engineer
Microfluidic allows devices like this chip to simulate biological organs
Wladimir Bulgar / Photo Library Science
How the world flows
(Albert Folch, Oxford University Press, for sale now)
What are rainbows, inkjet printers, human skin tests, pregnancy tests and fish branchies have in common?
To answer this question, we must travel to Albert Folch, professor of bio-engineering at Washington University, calls the “Lilliputian world of fluids”. Here, we meet the science of microfluidal, which deals with liquids on the smallest scale, tiny veins of the human body with microcanals engraved on laboratory fleas.
The new folch book How the world flows: the microfluidic of rain drops with wearing testsis a dazzling exploration of the countless ways whose microfluidic underlying our world. This book owes a debt, which Folch recognizes, by his neurobiologist wife. She encouraged him to write not only on microfluidic chips, which, as he shows, proved to be invaluable for research in chemistry, biology and medicine, but also the microfluidic “devices” created by nature.
This means that his book depicts a wider image, addressing examples as current and technological as portable devices for DNA sequencing, and as old as the way the biggest trees in the world obtain nutrients to their leaves. By the way, Folch also explains phenomena such as the capillarity of paper, which allows us to write on it, and why the candles have locks – not to mention the operation of car engines, which gives the book an almost encyclopedic character.
At the same time, each of the 18 chapters, all quite succinct and accompanied by a summary, opens with a personal history of a figure in history: an inventor, an athlete and a chef, for example, which makes them accessible.
Physics in How the world flows Are the bread and butter of what you can encounter in a university class on fluids – viscosity, surface tension, gravity, etc. – But rather than being formulated in notoriously difficult equations, they are explained simply and in a coherent manner giving a real context.
Sometimes I found myself wanting more details with the devices and the processes on which folch is concentrated. Meanwhile, the space given to more recent inventions, such as chip size devices that imitate whole organs, sometimes seemed slightly small compared to the plethora of historical information.
However, as I read, I felt that I learned a huge number of facts, a lot about everyday life, which I simply had not thought deeply. It turns out that microfluidic is essential to understand how perspiration has helped us to become bipeds, why the lakes are not content to flow into the earth below and how each vertebrate can hear the calls of their loved ones. There was even a section on incredibly complex engineering of parts in the mouth of a mosquito!
Folch writes with undeniable enthusiasm and warmth, but sometimes falls into tropes of popular scientific writing which do not always serve the general tone of the book. For example, a large part of the work of the scientists presented in his book is presented alongside stories from their childhood, a stylistic system that can go from related to hagiographic.
And I grimace each time the book underlined how remarkable it is that anyone without rigorous education could have advanced microfluidics – which was conceived as a compliment also transmitted a feeling of elitism.
That apart, it is a force of How the world flows That it understands a distribution of really diverse characters, stressing again the point that microfluidic is really an essential part of the construction of our world.
Above all, it looks like a book that could convince you to become an engineer if you read it at a fairly young age. This could also remind you at any age the pure complexity and wonder of any object when you put it under a microscope. It overflows with curiosity.
