For a soldier in the field, a slight hand tremor, tic of the eye, sudden sore throat or whiff of a noxious odor could urgently put his battery-powered portable lab to work. Such microfluidic labs-on-a-chip could let soldiers test their own blood for exposure to many toxins simultaneously and in a matter of minutes. At least, that was the goal of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he landed a U.S. Army contract to pursue work on the tiny tool. Although commercially available "gene chips" can test blood for thousands of toxins simultaneously, it takes hours to diffuse a blood sample across the whole array and then scan for fluorescence. Laboratory high-voltage power supplies could speed the operation with the pumping action of an electric field, but a battery-powered device could not supply that much juice. Enter an MIT mathematician with friends in the engineering school and funding from the Army's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies has solved the problem with a low-voltage micropump. A new company, ICEO Technologies Inc., will commercialize the micropump technology.