Battery-Powered Plasma Flashlight Makes Short Work of Bacteria 133
cylonlover writes "An international team of scientists has created a handheld, battery powered device that has been shown to effectively rid skin of bacteria in an instant by blasting it with plasma. The plasma flashlight, which shouldn't be confused with a plasma torch that will damage much more than bacteria if used on the skin, could provide a convenient way for paramedics and military personnel to deal with harmful bacteria in the field. The self-contained device is powered by a 12 V battery and doesn't require any external gas feed or handling system. The plume of plasma it generates is between 20-23C (68-73.4F), so it won't damage the skin. It is also fitted with resistors to stop it heating up and becoming too hot to touch. Its creators say it can also be easily manufactured at a cost of less than US$100 per unit."
No thanks. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No thanks. (Score:4, Funny)
"Oh No! Rory's intestines are hanging out, and a little kids are sneezing all over it! Johnson, grab me the torch! No, the OTHER one!"
Re:No thanks. (Score:5, Funny)
I like the bacteria that live on my body.. we have a relationship, once in a while a renegade causes some mayhem but otherwise its a very healthy existance that we've agreed to. Keep your death lights away, I dont need them.
Considering your profession, I'd think you would want to buy stock.
Re:No thanks. (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, Mickey. His nickname says that he is an adult film producer. :P
Re:No thanks. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Perhaps he's thinking of blood plasma?
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Re:No thanks. (Score:5, Insightful)
I like the bacteria that lives on my body too... not so much the bacteria in the creek on the side of the road seeping into my open wounds thanks to the asshat who just cut me off.
This kind of thing could be great for people who have allergies to anti-bacterial agents or, as the summary states, "provide a convenient way for paramedics and military personnel to deal with harmful bacteria in the field." If you're going to complain about killing off the good bacteria on your skin then rail about anti-bacterial soap and hand sanitizer, their daily use does far more damage to the good bacteria on your skin than any $100+ device used in an emergency will ever do.
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Based on nearly every emergency room doctor asking me if I have an allergy to Penicillin [wikipedia.org] during the medical history part of the interview I figured it was an actual real thing. Still, just in case, I found this Wiki page talking about Penicillin drug reactions [wikipedia.org] that covers allergic reactions and has links to some studies or some such thing.
Honestly I'm not really well versed in the nitty gritty medical terms so I didn't entirely understand everything on the page, but I figure if its important enough for a d
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Penicillin is an antibiotic. When people speak of antibacterials they're usually referring to things you apply topically/externally, like iodine, alcohol, and peroxide.
Haptens (Score:5, Informative)
That said, I've never heard of an allergic reaction to either a simple alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. Skin irritation, sure, but not an allergic reaction.
Iodine is another matter. Antibacterial iodine is usually povidone-iodine, and it definitely is possible to have a severe allergic reaction to it. Various sources disagree as to why this happens, but it definitely does.
It's also possible, although rare, to have an allergic reaction to iodine-based contrast dyes. My mother nearly died from an injection some of this stuff, as a matter of fact.
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As it happens my mother was also highly allergic to sh
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Ever poured alcohol or hydrogen peroxide on an open wound?
DAMN!!! that hurts.
This could allow for the disinfection of an open wound without sending the patient into shock.
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I've heard of latex allergies
Ew, must be painful...
(from gloves)
*sighofrelief* fortunately I'm not into fisting (but for those who are: that'll itch even more, at a less accessible place!)
Re:No thanks. (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a friend who's allergic to latex. Forget the itch. Anaphylactic shock. When I asked him about the common use of latex being inconvenient, he said there were non-latex versions available.
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I always think bac
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They use the tech to sterilize equipment in labs, why not use it to sterilize people?
I don't think that means what you think it means.
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you're going to complain about killing off the good bacteria on your skin then rail about anti-bacterial soap and hand sanitizer, their daily use does far more damage to the good bacteria on your skin than any $100+ device used in an emergency will ever do
Personally, i don't use either, as they are bad.
However, i do agree, in cases where your skin is open, you do want to stop bad bacteria from entering and its an acceptable risk to burn off some good in order to stop the bad. ( be it a simple paper cut, sever cat scratch or being run over by a truck and your arm is danging..)
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this is meant for just such an occasion when the balance is unbalanced..
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How would you feel about a surgeon using one before opening you up?
Is it as effective as ozone? (Score:2)
Re:Is it as effective as ozone? (Score:4, Informative)
MRSA (Score:2)
MRSA is no the product of a total war on bacteria, but the product of a careless war.
Our use of antibiotics is like sending a single policeman with a single gun to every incident reporting and not caring if they return. In most cases it will be enough, but in the long run there will be many criminals with police guns in their hands
(and even if they do not need the new guns, they still get fresh ammo all the time).
Hospitals are then favelas handled like that, i.e. sending one or two policemen with automatic
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no, MRSA is a direct result of the moronic overuse of antibiotics.
Re:Is it really the plasma, not the ozone or UV? (Score:5, Informative)
There's a paywall? Didn't notice, but here you go:
Battery-powered plasma flashlight makes short work of bacteria
By Darren Quick
00:51 April 5, 2012
An international team of scientists has created a handheld, battery powered device that has been shown to effectively rid skin of bacteria in an instant by blasting it with plasma. The plasma flashlight, which shouldn’t be confused with a plasma torch that will damage much more than bacteria if used on the skin, could provide a convenient way for paramedics and military personnel to deal with harmful bacteria in the field.
The self-contained device is powered by a 12 V battery and doesn’t require any external gas feed or handling system. The plume of plasma it generates is between 20-23C (68-73.4F), so it won’t damage the skin. It is also fitted with resistors to stop it heating up and becoming too hot to touch. Its creators say it can also be easily manufactured at a cost of less than US$100 per unit.
In an experiment carried out by the scientists, the plasma flashlight effectively inactivated thick biofilms of Enterococcus faecalis, a bacterium that often infects the root canals in dental treatments and is highly antibiotic- and heat-resistant. Created by incubating the bacteria for seven days, the biofilms consisted of 17 different layers of bacteria. After treating each biofilm with the plasma flashlight for five minutes, the plasma was found to penetrate deep into the very bottom layer and inactivate the bacteria.
“In this study we chose an extreme example to demonstrate that the plasma flashlight can be very effective even at room temperature,” said co-author of the study, Professor Kostya (Ken) Ostrikov, from the Plasma Nanoscience Centre Australia, CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering. “For individual bacteria, the inactivation time could be just tens of seconds.”
While plasma has previously been shown to effectively kill bacteria and viruses on the surface of the skin and water, the exact mechanism behind this is still not understood. Ultraviolet radiation has been theorized as a reason, but the jet created by the plasma flashlight is low in UV radiation, which adds to the safety of using the device on a person’s skin. The reactions between the plasma and the surrounding air has also been suggested as another possibility.
The international team behind the plasma flashlight consists of scientists from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering, The University of Sydney and the City University of Hong Kong. Their work is detailed in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.
Source: Institute of Physics
More cold plasma experiments. (Score:1)
For those with interest in the subject :
http://ceee.hust.edu.cn/plasma/about.htm#jet
Real science, please (Score:5, Informative)
"It is also fitted with resistors to stop it heating up and becoming too hot to touch."
Um. What? Whoever wrote this clearly has no electronics knowledge. This is Slashdot. We have real engineers and scientists around here. Could we have real science reporting, please? Not only is that sentence moronic, the entire article fails to explain how this device operates, even in the most basic terms. It's shaped like a flashlight, but that seems to be where the similarity ends. It is not a light source whatsoever. From the actual scientific publication, it appears that this is a high voltage pulse generator that produces a discharge between the device and the patient. A series of 100ns pulses at 20KHz repetition rate ionizes the air between the device and the patient, thus producing the ions that kill the bacteria. The peak current is 6mA, but the average current (and thus average power) is very low so heating is minimal. This is a relatively low-tech device electronically, and could easily be replicated by many hobbyists.
Re:Real science, please (Score:4, Informative)
"It is also fitted with resistors and shit to stop it heating up and becoming too hot to touch."
That better?
Re:Real science, please (Score:4, Informative)
No, because resistors generate heat when current flows through them.
Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean the total heat dissipated increases. If you have a constant voltage supply (typical), adding a resistor in *series* with the load *reduces* the total power dissipated. Yes, the resistor generates heat, but that is more than offset by a reduction in the heat generated by the load.
If a resistor in series with the load reduces the current by 1/2, the power dissipated by the load is reduced to 1/4 what it would be without the load.
Constant voltage is the most common case, as it is supplied by outlets and batteries, but some power supplies provide constant current, in which case adding a resistor in series would not alter the load power dissipation, and (as you are asserting) the heat generated by the resistor would add to the net heat dissipation.
Supposing you're driving an LED (disclaimer, I am not an LED lighting engineer), you'd want to keep it in the correct current range, so you'd use a constant current power supply. If you put a second identical LED in series with the first, you'd double the load resistance [note 1], but the power supply's voltage would adjust so the current remains the same. The Captain Obvious result is that if you drive 2 serially connected LEDs off your constant current supply instead of 1, the power dissipated doubles. The somewhat less obvious result is that if you're using a constant voltage supply the total power dissipated drops, so the the power dissipated by each of the two LEDs is less than one half what a single LED would.
note 1: LEDs aren't linear in their response like a plain resistor, so this wouldn't necessarily be true if we were talking about a constant voltage supply like a battery.
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FTFY
"It is also fitted with shit to stop it heating up and becoming too hot to touch."
Re:Real science, please (Score:4, Informative)
Shaped like a flashlight? Really? It looks like a crayon.
The article is http://iopscience.iop.org/0022-3727/45/16/165205/pdf/0022-3727_45_16_165205.pdf (may need registering, but it's free to download for a month)
The summary is semi-correct, but phrased terribly. The resistors provide enough ballast to limit the output power to 60mW. If you short the device the combined 100MegOhm is only going to dissipate a Watt of power. It's not so much to stop the device being warm to the touch, it's to stop the device from blowing up and/or burning your patient.
If they weren't there then you're essentially trying to dump 10kV into a human body which is roughly 10kOhm to be conservative. The resistance of air is about a megaOhm per centimetre, but presumably if it's arcing due to the plasma it'll have negligible resistance after ionisation. What would probably happen is the DC converter would blow up, but you'd get a pretty nasty shock.
Similarly as the human body has a maximum resistance of a few hundred kOhm, the plasma current is dominated by the two ballast resistors. Incidentally, it looks like the patient will either need to be wired up or will have to disinfect themselves because the thing works by pulling your body to ground with respect to the electrodes.
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It is also fitted with resistors to stop it heating up and becoming too hot to touch.
Maybe these are thermovariable resistors, that are used to detect when temperature is rising too high, and temporarily reduce power if/when it happens?
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This is why I come to slashdot, and this alone.
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Yes, the authors have managed to write a sentence that is incomprehensible to people who understand electronics and people who don't, but for different reasons.
Let me plays devil's advocate, though, and construe a speculative interpretation that might make sense.
This thing generates plasma -- from what? Probably the air. So my guess is that it applies a pulse of high voltage to ionize the air, producing a plasma. Now suppose the plasma is too hot, what would adding a resistor in series do?
Well, a resistance
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note 1: air can be ionized or not, but I have no idea whether it can unionize.
I fully support fair wages for air.
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Yes! I knew someone would write a comment on that sentence. IANAEE, but I know resistors release heat when a current passes through them.
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Apparently, you are not one of those engineers you speak of. Otherwise, you'd know that since since power = I^2R and I = V/R, adding a resistor will reduce the total heat produced.
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Plasma flashlight, sonic screwdriver... (Score:1)
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Laser flashlights in Larry Niven's Ringworld (Score:2)
I don't know, but this sounds more like a lightsaber. Just crank up the power a little bit.
Actually that is precise how the laser flashlights in Larry Niven's Ringworld (1970) operated. On a low setting they were pretty much flashlights. They were designed to be covert, non-obvious weapons. However if the power was dialed up you had a powerful energy weapon for slicing things at a distance.
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Had to sell them to get a bacon stretcher and new muffler bearings.
This blasphemer needs drawn and qurtered! (Score:2)
In my Universe[1], I would let you slide on the muffler bearings, BUT the bacon stretcher is just taking things too far! ;-)
Repent your evil ways and use a bacon condenser instead.
Just think, put in 10 kilos of bacon, and get a handful of bullion cube sized bacon bites!
Density FTW! (just ask my bathroom scales!)
All hyperbolic humour/sarcasm aside......a 'bacon stretcher'? :-)
That's a new one for me, first time I've encountered that one...Thanks!
[1] I am the Emperor of my fantasy Universe, so I get to make
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You never worked at a restaurant? Maybe it's just breakfast restaurants. Between looking for the non-existent attic/basement for a non-existent bacon stretcher and figuring out how not to tap the grease trap in the parking lot(big mess), it's amazing I passed my 1st week dish dogging. Luckily I did, good times were had... If my parents only knew.
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I've worked in many restaurants [including family owned], and still have never heard of that particular device. :-)
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Damn Aussies - watch out for patent claims (Score:1)
It is the CSIRO again!
I'll take two! (Score:3, Interesting)
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If they make a BFG [platformnation.com] version of it you could sanitize the entire bodies of a whole roomful of people in like seconds! ;)
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That would be great. Now I can leave the bathroom with sanitized poop on my hands.
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Toilet paper dispensers are usually on the left, and somehow I've just never managed to try and work from the other side. I fear your strange fascination with my wiping habits.
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It's still much easier with soap. Just no need for disinfectant soap. And I still don't get how it replaces a towel either.
Something Fishy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Something Fishy (Score:5, Interesting)
The resistors limit current. And yes, they will heat up (somewhat). But better the resistors than your skin. I'm sure they are located within the device so as not to contact your skin.
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Fry's Electronics (Score:1)
They sell this hand held battery powered bacteria killing U.V. light at Fry's electronics. As shown on T.V.!!!
Ironic, my captcha is 'emitted'.
This tool was invented once already. (Score:3)
http://www.odu.edu/ao/research/ip/PlasmaPencil.pdf [odu.edu]
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The pencil that you cite requires a gas source so they aren't using identical techniques to generate the plasma: http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050919/full/news050919-13.html
good idea! (Score:1)
I can see these replacing all those tedious hand-dryers in public toilets now - blast your bacteria and virii away in seconds!
$100USD (Score:1)
Which means with enough middlemen, the standard good old boy networking, and the proper paperwork, the US Military will be paying somewhere between $7000-$9000USD each in large quantities.
Yeah for the 1%er's!
Does it work against .... (Score:3)
Walls (Score:3)
I wonder if it would work on walls? We have some persistent fungus in parts of our house. Bleach the bastard and in a few weeks it's back.
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Hey, when shopping for a house in Santa Fe, I paid a few hundred bucks to a very professional Assessment for Microbial Contamination from Dan Stih of www.HealthyLivingSpaces.com. It included counts of a variety of classes/species of fungus hanging out outside and contrasted that with the air quality in various parts of the house. It then honed in on physical penetration tests of surfaces like wood, tile grout and drywall, with an detailed recommendation for a remediation protocol.
I was very satisfied with
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I forgot to add:
don't overlook any HVAC duct-work as a source!
Which is better? (Score:1, Interesting)
I wonder if the bacteria that live on my skin stop more germs than my immune system. I suspect so since they have the numbers. It is sad that I can't find a bar of soap that does not have anti bacterial stuff in it. Germophobes have come down with some nasty fungal infections after ridding their skin of bacteria. It sounds useful for treating that missing patch of skin that time I left it on the goose poop decorated bike path. That one started to show sign of blood poisoning.
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I don't recall specifically any info on skin bacteria, but many species of bacteria use chemical warfare to combat rivals and competition.
In addition, mostly they seem to rely on the 'crowding out the competition' tactic that weeds use on grass and gardens...'consume all the resources to deny your enemy a foothold'.
It's a proven and valid strategy for most species of all orders(not just bacteria), historically.
Trivial/arcane fact:
40%-65% of the volume of 'the average human turd' is dead bacterial corpses fr
Plasma torches, how do they work?! (Score:1)
Hmmm thanks, but I'd prefer to sit tight until we know exactly how it does this. I know it has probably gone through rigourous testing etc., but if we've no idea how it works we've no idea how it could be causing other damage. We used to think throwing antibiotics at every possible problem was a great idea until we discovered transmiss
Re:Plasma torches, how do they work?! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, and it worries me to read "we don't know how it kills the bacteria" and "it's only 20-23C, so it won't damage the skin" in the same article. I'm not one of those "OMG it might cause cancer" types, but this seems to be one example where such fears could be warranted. After all, you could say "it's only 20-23C so it won't kill any bacteria" but that's obviously not true. Could we maybe first figure out what it does exactly before declaring it safe and letting paramedics use it on a daily basis?
Plasma, free radicals, cell damage, cancer (Score:1)
The thing produces free radicals, which are molecules with unpaired electrons. Since electron really prefer to be paired, a free radical will catch an electron from any nearby molecule, turning the later into another free radical. Each time a molecule from a cell is touched by this chain reactions, it is damaged and will need repair. This is true for microbes, but for human cells as well
Cells have defenses. Molecules such as Vitamin C and E, Glutathione, or the SuperOxyde Dismutase enzyme, will be able to e
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Flesh Light (Score:1)
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Hmmm, I don't think that word means what you think it means...
How many plasma flashlights for a plasma TV (Score:2)
and can it do 3D? :p
A hundred bucks? (Score:2)
I could build several UVC-LED flashlights for that much and get the same effects with better lifetime, durability, and portability.
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Wouldn't that come with the added bonus of free cancer?
Light-saber (Score:2)
The Fleshlight!!! (Score:1)
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Soap (Score:1)
The Germ Theory of Disease is just a theory! (Score:3)
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exactly what I was thinking - basically a Tesla oil - high frequency, high voltage. Didn't know that when I was a kid messing with high voltage I was also killing bacteria on my skin....
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Anybody else read that as fleshlight?
Yes. And I got far more excited than I should admit without ticking "Post Anonymously".
powered by methane microlasers! (Score:2)
COME ON PEOPLE, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY!!!