- 🧪🧠 New preprint out! Soft Hardware, Flowing Software We introduce reconfigurable microfluidics as an active control layer for chemical computation. Geometry, and flow, and not molecular redesign, programs function. Great work by Piet! chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10....
- 💡 The core idea: Instead of encoding computation only in chemistry, we make the reaction vessel itself programmable. Soft hydrogel structures can be written & erased in situ, reshaping flow, mixing, and reaction environments on demand. #3Dprinting #microfluidicsJan 27, 2026 13:38
- 🔁 This enables something powerful: The same molecular system can perform different computations simply by changing physical structure. No new DNA strands. No new chemistry. Just new geometry. #chemicalcomputation #systemschemistry
- 🧬 We show this first with switchable DNA logic: AND ↔ OR gates realized using the same DNA network — logic reassigned purely by reconfiguring microfluidic flow paths. #DNAnanoscience
- 🌊 Then things get fun: With a pH oscillator, reconfigurable geometry gives rise to standing chemical waves. Emergent spatiotemporal patterns from the interplay of reaction dynamics × flow × structure. #complexity #oscillator #noneqsys
- 🧠 These patterns become computation: The material system itself acts as a physical reservoir, enabling analogue & reservoir computing. Nonlinear functions are recovered with a simple linear readout: The complexity lives in the material. #reservoircomputing
- 🧱 Key message: We add a new computational dimension - hardware-level programmability - to chemical computing. Function is reassigned by physical reconfiguration, not molecular redesign.
- 🔮 Why this matters: Reconfigurable soft microfluidics point toward adaptive chemical matter, embodied computation, and future closed-loop chemical learning systems. #physicalintelligence #softmatter #adaptivematerials
