Dr. Shuichi Takayama, an Associate Professor of Macromolecular Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, has fabricated nanoscale fluid channels simply by carefully stretching surface-treated rubber. This is similar to the way in which little cracks appear in a rubber band when you stretch it. The channels have a width in the ballpark of 80 nm and are tunable to some extent. Improvements in functionality are expected "through the integration of parallel and serial operations, sophisticated optics and a wealth of polymer chemistry", Takayama says. The image shows fluorescein molecules moving through an array of five nanochannels.