Hot on the heels of being crowned the most
prolific pirating university in the land, Purdue is donning its halo once again by kicking out
yet another invention that will surely make the world a better place to reside. The Mini 10 prototype is a handheld chemical analyzer that its creators have likened to Star Trek's "
Tricorder," and while the internal abilities should genuinely impress, we're handing out a round of golf claps for the uber-glitzy motif it's got going on. The sophisticated sensing system measures just 13.5- x 8.5- x 7.5-inches and weighs in at 22-pounds, which is around 30 times less than conventional mass
spectrometers, and aside from its ability to be completely portable via battery power, it still sports the same sniffing capabilities as its mammoth-sized siblings. In order to cram such potent chemical sensing abilities into such a small package, a miniature mass spectrometer is "combined with a technique called desorption electrospray ionization (DESI)," and can display the chemical composition of materials in a "matter of minutes without harming the samples." Interestingly enough, the prototype has already analyzed garb, food, and actual cocaine, and while we're not quite sure when you'll be able to snatch one of these up to "
check in" on your mischievous teen, a couple of Indiana-based firms are apparently already looking into commercialization options.
Slashdot]
Hot on the heels of Purdue's Mini 10 chemical analyzer comes a (somewhat) similar creature from the other side of the globe, as Osaka University's Yoshiaki Sugimoto and colleagues have "found a way to use the atomic force microscope to produce images that reveal the chemical identity of individual atoms on a surface." Essentially, this new discovery allows scientists to look at a mixed material and "pick out individual atoms of different elements on its surface, such as tin or silicon." The microscopes themselves are quite common in this realm, but until now, they have not been capable of distinguishing between atoms of different chemical elements. The atomic fingerprint, as it's so aptly named, is what the crew scrutinized in order to distinguish between varying atoms on a sample surface, as they witnessed that the relationship between force and distance is "slightly different for atoms of different elements." Of course, we have to look for the practical use in all this hubbub, and a non-participating scientist from the UK has insinuated that the discovery could be useful for nanotechnology researchers trying to design devices at the molecular level -- and who wouldn't be down a little nanotech garb or a snazzy new water-repelling umbrella?
