Nose For Difficulty

A portable germ scanner exposes tainted meals.

You are LUNCHING in a greasy spoon wherever a dude termed Roach has grilled up your burger, additional bloody. Obviously, you happen to be leery. So you whip out your particular food scanner to verify for E. coli and other microbial nastiness. That, at least, is the eyesight of Purdue University's R. Graham Cooks and his colleague Zheng Ouyang, who have generated a transportable mass spectrometer, the Mini 11, that can detect almost everything from bacteria to drug residue.

Mass spectrometers can identify the chemical composition of just about something by sorting molecules according to their mass and electrical cost. Trouble is, most industrial instruments are dishwasher-dimension. The Mini eleven is no much larger than a Kleenex box and weighs only 8 kilos. It is outfitted with a hose that spritzes samples with ionized h2o, dislodging molecules that are then sucked within and analyzed in seconds.

Cooks aims to make a sub-4-pound unit by 2009 Then, he insists, everyone will want just one. "The universe is a chemical object," he says. "I see this as a way for the public to be empowered."

Michael Stroh

Author: Stroh, Michael