Costing just a cent to produce and requiring just a single drop of blood, this paper chip, designed by Harvard chemist George Whitesides, can diagnose HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and more. What substance makes this tiny marvel possible? Comic-book ink. The water-resistant ink pushes the blood into the different paper channels, each of which contain chemicals that react with the blood and change color to indicate the presence and severity of the various diseases.

Costing just a cent to produce and requiring just a single drop of blood to function, this paper chip, designed by chemist George Whitesides, can diagnose HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and more. What substance makes this tiny marvel possible? Comic-book ink. The water-resistant ink pushes the blood into the different paper channels, each of which contain chemicals that react with the blood and change color to indicate the presence and severity of the various diseases. In developing countries where technology for diagnosing diseases needs to be cheap and easy for individuals to use themselves, it’s hard to imagine a test simpler than Whitesides’ “zero cost diagnostics”.

If a printer doesn’t need toner, ink or copy paper, is it still a printer? Well, I guess if a bear still shits in a forest, then yes. Using plastic paper, it’s a very green (and pricey) way of printing. The PrePeat RP-3100 paper is actually made from PET plastic, which means it can be reused up to 1,000—so once your printed document is no longer needed, it can be inserted back in the printer, where the line thermal head prints the ink-less words on again. However eco-friendly it may be, there are some major downsides to the PrePeat RP-3100.

Augmented reality’s used in pointless ways , but here’s finally something decent: A rock-paper-scissors shirt. Just plop down by a computer and play with the creepy hand jumping out from your chest like the fun people in this demo video. T-Post, which appears to be a monthly magazine that brings a shirt with every issue, is the source of this fantastic find. All you have to do is put on one of the shirts, sit in front of a computer with a webcam, run T-Post’s webapp and well…just watch: Is it weird? Yes.

It was only a couple of months ago that MIT was wooing us with the energy-preserving properties of carbon nanotubes, and in a classic act of oneupmanship Stanford has now come out and demonstrated paper batteries, which work thanks to a carbon nanotube and silver nanowire “ink.” We’ve seen this idea before, but the ability to just douse a sheet of paper in the proper magical goo and make a battery out of it is as new as it is mindblowing. Battery weight can, as a result, be reduced by 20 percent, and the fast energy discharge of this technology lends itself to utilization in electric vehicles. The video after the break should enlighten and thrill you in equal measures. Continue reading Stanford wants to roll its own paper batteries Stanford wants to roll its own paper batteries originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds

Be honest: you really want to crack open a magazine and find one of these paper-thin USB key ads, right? No? Well… here’s the thing. We really think this is a cool concept — made to order, super slim, die cut USB drives that can be tucked in the pages of a newspaper or magazine (if you know what those are) — with whatever content a company wants to throw on there. However, we’re also not really sure the inserts would be compelling enough for us to ever consider loading up whatever content was on it

To be honest, at first they looked like humping paper beasts and I thought: “Hmmm, nice.” Then I learnt they were paper shoes and I thought: “Hmmm, nice.” Either way, these are funky and pretty. [ Le Creative Sweatshop via Mocoloco ]

Designer Matt Brown created these sweet-looking laser-cut paper radios with a twist: They’re equipped with RFID chips that can interact with a speaker to broadcast messages or change the radio to a pre-decided station. Basically, you can program certain controls or sounds into the paper radio . Say you’re an artist who wants to bring attention to a local college radio station—you program that into the RFID chip, and then when the paper radio is draped on any speaker equipped with an RFID reader, it’ll change the station to the one you picked. Or you can have it broadcast short messages; Matt suggests a particular environmentalist star of 30 Rock might program in warnings to turn off your lights when not in use. It’s a very particular usage, but the radios themselves look so cool that we don’t really care if they’re 100% practical.

There have been some pretty horrible iPhone knock-offs, but I say enough is enough when you have to draw in your own apps. Indeed, the only way you are going to make a phone call on this is if you use your imagination. These paper iPhones are designed for one thing and one thing only—taking notes. At least it’s double sided—one half for regular notes and the other half for technical sketches. [ Notepod via iSpazio via OhGizmo ]

This do-it-yourself cardboard iPhone dock is so pretty that it actually could have been designed by Jonathan Ive himself. Of course, if Ive had designed it, it would have an Apple logo and sell for $40 instead of being free. Pretty sweet. Go get the PDF and do it yourself here. [ iPhone Dock via Unplggd ]