Computer and Water | Amazing work by scientists at Stanford

Water and Computer are as deadly combo as we can imagine for the computers. We always keep water at a considerable distance from our computers, but Manu Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, and his students had some other plans.

Manu Prakash along with his students at Stanford is able to make a computer that runs using water droplets! I can feel the "What???" in your mind, even I was also awestruck when I first read about it. Further adding to the amazement, theoretically this droplet computer can perform any operation that a conventional computer can do, although at a considerable slow place.

“We already have digital computers to process information. Our goal is not to compete with electronic computers or to operate word processors on this,” Prakash said. “Our goal is to build a completely new class of computers that can precisely control and manipulate physical matter. Imagine if when you run a set of computations that not only information is processed but physical matter is algorithmically manipulated as well. We have just made this possible at the mesoscale.”
 

"We're very interestedin engaging anybody and everybody who wants to play, to enable everyone todesign new circuits based on building blocks we describe in this paper ordiscover new blocks," Prakash says. "Right now, anyone can put these circuits together to forma complex droplet processor with no external control – something that was avery difficult challenge previously. If you look backat big advances in society, computation takes a special place. We are trying tobring the same kind of exponential scale up because of computation we saw in thedigital world into the physical world."The results of this research have been published in the journal Nature Physics.

Source - Stanford