Free Republic

Researchers have successfully created a new test that could eliminate the need for needles in testing for viruses — and dramatically increase the success rate of doctors trying to diagnose an illness. It’s called ViroCap, and while the test is not ready for use in patients just yet, it has passed a big clinical trial that is paving the way for its eventual entry into the market, according to a UPI report. ViroCap supposedly can detect any virus known to man — and animals — and it could help doctors who don’t know what they’re looking for spot a virus...

Star Trek fans will know about the Tricorder, a handheld device used by Captain Kirk and company to, among other things, scan the biological state of the living creatures they encountered on their interplanetary voyage. Today, almost 50 years after the science-fiction series first aired on American television, the device is close to becoming a reality. “It really is very difficult to build, but not impossible,” says Walter De Brouwer, the founder and CEO of Scanadu, a start-up company based in Sillicon Valley working with the NASA space agency to build a 21st-century Tricorder, to be put on the market...

October 1, 2007 A Californian based company has produced the world’s first disposable photonic lab-on-a-chip solution for next-generation water and food analysis, chemical and biological agent detection, and point-of-care diagnostics. The PhotonicLab Platform from Bioident Technology Inc. enables rapid in-vitro diagnostics, chemical and biological threat detection, and environmental testing without the need for off-site lab analysis. This offers greater mobility and sensitivity compared to existing biological and chemical assays and delivers a cost-effective disposable lab-on-a-chip solution by eliminating the need for complex and expensive readout systems. To produce the device Bioident utilized the latest breakthroughs in nanotechnology and leveraged...

Purdue researchers have come up with a handheld device they say can determine the chemical composition of an object or detect trace elements on its surface, sort of like the tricorder that the actors used to whip out on Star Trek. The chemical analysis tool sprays a fine mist of charged water droplets onto an object. The water droplets cling to particles on the surface of the object. The ionized particles are separated and dried out; the chemicals that remain thus provide a chemical map to the surface of the item tested or the object itself. If there are skin...

The Star Trek vision of analysing rocks and minerals with the sweep of a handheld device has taken a step towards becoming science rather than science fiction. "We are developing a tricorder," said Robert Downs, associate professor of geosciences at The University of Arizona in Tucson. Professor Downs is using a technique called Raman spectroscopy to compile a library of spectral fingerprints for all the Earth's minerals. About 1,500 of the 4,000 known minerals have been catalogued so far. Although the current Raman spectrometer takes up an area the size of a tabletop, Professor Downs's colleague M. Bonner Denton, a...