MassSpectrometry
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Fingerprints will soon tell cops if suspects are on cocaine
A research team from the University of Surrey in the UK has reportedly developed a new, noninvasive drug test for cocaine that accurately detects its presence in your system through your fingerprints. Specifically, it looks for two common cocaine metabolites: benzoylecgonine and methylecgonine. These can be found in blood, sweat, and urine using a mass spectrometry technique known as Desorption Electrospray Ionisation (DESI). And since the metabolites dissipate from our sweat more quickly than in urine or blood (in which it can persist for up to a week), law enforcement will one day be able tell if a suspect is currently high as opposed to having been high a few nights before. What's more, "we can distinguish between cocaine having been touched," Melanie Bailey, the study's lead author, told Motherboard, "and cocaine having been ingested." Plus since the sweat sample is tied to your fingerprint, it'll be nearly impossible for someone to swap it out for a clean batch.
MIT's big ideas for small kit that makes crime scene investigations faster, cheaper
Mass spectrometry. What's it good for anyway? Analyzing substances to figure out just what they are, that's what. The inherent problem with the process, though, is that it's basically impossible to do outside of a dedicated lab. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (more commonly known as MIT) think they have a solution to that problem: shrinking the necessary testing components down to nanoscale-sized versions, which would allow analyses to be performed with a tool the size of a smartphone. They'd be a lot cheaper too, dropping the price from "tens of thousands of dollars" down to "hundreds" according to MIT News. Ideally, this would make vaporizing (!) samples a ton faster without crime scene investigators, among others, sacrificing the analysis' quality for convenience -- as if criminals needed more worries about covering their tracks. [Image credit: Getty]
This is what brain synapses look like in 3D
Many know that brains are inherently complex things; there are trillions of synapses converting chemical and electrical signals in a human mind. However, did you know that even those synapses are very complex? If not, it should be perfectly clear now. German scientists have used a mix of extremely high-resolution microscopes (both electron and fluorescent), mass spectrometry and protein detection to create a super-detailed 3D map of a synapse in a rat's brain. It's almost like a miniscule city -- those dots you see represent 300,000 proteins, and only a tiny portion (the glowing red patch at the bottom) is transmitting chemicals.
Artificial nose becomes coffee analyzer, sniffs out KIRF Starbucks venues
Artificial schnozzes have been sniffing foreign objects for years now, but rarely are they engineered to sniff out specific things. A team of researchers from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign have done just that, though, with a new snout that acts as a coffee analyzer. Reportedly, the device can "distinguish between ten well-known commercial brands of coffee and can also make a distinction between coffee beans that have been roasted at different temperatures or lengths of time." The significance here is that this distinction is incredibly difficult to make, and it could one day help coffee growers determine whether batches are as good as prior batches on the cheap. More importantly, however, it could help the modern java hunter determine whether or not they're walking in a corporate Starbucks or one of those "branded" kiosks with two-fifths the menu. Brilliant, right?
