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]

Flipping over to alternate energy sources isn't just the rage in vehicles, as we've seen steam-powered and string-powered computers already, and now we're witnessing an oddity that's actually energized by bubbles. The "microfluidic" computer performs calculations by squeezing bubbles through tiny channels etched into a chip, and although it runs around 1,000 times slower than you're average desktop today and takes up quite a bit more room, no AC outlet is required to churn out chemical analysis. Manu Prakash and Neil Gershenfeld of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms created the devices by "etching channels about one micron wide into silicon, and then using nitrogen bubbles contained in water to represent bits of information flowing through these channels." The computer utilizes Boolean logic functions to carry out its work, and the researchers are already envisioning it carrying bubbles of molecules or individual cells to "conduct diagnostics or detect pathogens." We'll admit, a bubble-powered PC ain't too shabby, but even proponents fessed up that such a snail isn't putting modern day machine vendors out of business anytime soon.

While the folks behind the AACS could probably use a few pointers about constructing a sufficient lock of their own, a group of scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovat, Israel have crafted a molecule-sized "keypad lock" that "only activates when exposed to the correct password, a sequence of chemicals and light." Organic chemist Abraham Shanzer and his colleagues suggest that their invention could "lead to a new level of safeguards for secret information," but we tend think the infamous hackers of the world would inevitably crack the code. Nevertheless, the molecule -- dubbed FLIP -- houses a core linker that mimics a bacterial compound that binds to iron, and attached to it are two molecules that respectively can glow either blue or green. Using three "buttons," which just so happen to be an acidic molecule, an alkaline compound, and ultraviolet light, the lock can be "opened" if given the right sequence of chemicals and light, and there's a grand total of two noticeable results possible. Interestingly, the researchers have insinuated that their creation could be used to recognize "when certain sequences of chemicals (like harmful toxins) are released in the body," but we haven't heard a 10-4 from the US Army just yet.

[Via Yahoo, thanks, Antonio H.]