We'll go ahead and warn you: if you're hoping to purge your mind of all things science this weekend, this post isn't the one to be reading. For the rest of you knowledge seekers, Arizona State University researcher Wayne Frasch has developed a biosensing nanodevice that could possibly revolutionize health screenings and speed up that grueling airport security process. Put simply (well, as simply as possible), he discovered that the enzyme F1– ATPase can be equipped with an optical probe and "manipulated to emit a signal when it detects a single molecule of target DNA." Currently, a prototype of the DNA detector is already being worked up, but there's no word on when (or if) the device will escape the lab and hit the commercial realm. Still not geeked out? Hit the read link and hold on for dear life.

[Via Physorg]

The world is already well aware of just how potent (and useful) femtosecond lasers are, and a recent study conducted by a team of Arizona State University physicists explains how pulses could be used to dismantle viruses and bacteria without harming a single innocent cell. Rather than follow in the footsteps of indiscriminate laser treatment options, the group of Sun Devils reportedly figured out a way to "produce lethal vibrations in the protein coat of microorganisms," which has the potential to at least treat "blood-borne diseases such as AIDS and Hepatitis." The technique, dubbed ISRS (Impulsive Stimulated Raman Scattering), has shown to not harm healthy human cells while fighting the good fight against viral pathogens, and while there's no easy way to surmise how quickly we'll see this in action, we're gonna wait for a bit more proof before getting our hopes up.

[Via Switched]

Wired has a write-up of a new storage technology developed at Arizona State University that could produce flash thumb drives capable of storing terabytes of data in the near future, that also happens to be cheaper and more energy efficient than flash memory. The new technology has been branded programmable metallization cell, and differs from present storage technologies in that it "creates nanowires from copper atoms the size of a virus to record binary ones and zeros." It all sounds very interesting -- if slightly too optimistic -- to us, and we'll get to find out relatively soon just how effective the new chips are: Arizona State's business arm has licensed the technology to three companies, which may be ready to sell a product containing the chips within 18 months. Watch this space.

Anyone who's ever read science fiction knows that in addition to space elevators and transporters, there's another futuristic technology that we'd all dig: terraforming. Being able to transform the moon, Mars, or any other barren celestial body into a new Earth would make human interplanetary colonization a bit more feasible. However, instead of terraforming an entire planet, which at current estimates could take centuries, it appears that altering one single square kilometer first might be a bit simpler. Earlier this year, Rigel Woida, an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, received a grant from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts to study "reflective balloons," which in theory could raise the surface temperature of Mars on that patch to 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius), compared with the typical high of -76 degrees Fahrenheit (-60 degrees Celsius). Woida recently gave a presentation at the NAIC meeting in October and will give another at a second meeting this March, where he will hopefully show NASA how great his concept his, and how the astronauts who study Mars in his little patch of paradise will be able to like, totally, get the best tan ever.