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Biochips may lead to Star-Trek-like tricorders 64

Posted by Hemos from the yeah-yeah-yeah dept.
rde writes "This week's (print edition of) New Scientist tells us that Motorola's BioChip Systems Unit are building a biochip that "will eventually produce hand-held machines that can perform genetic tests or detect disease" -- a tricorder by any other name. Their web page only points you to the hard copy, but details can be found on CMPNet. " Darnit-I still need to know when I can put the network jack in my head. Writing all this e-mail through thought would be a lot nicer.
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Biochips may lead to Star-Trek-like tricorders More

Biochips may lead to Star-Trek-like tricorders

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  • Actually, i think the sensor parts they are talking about are the tiny ones that float around in your stomach or bloodstream, and other such implants. They would be able to be read from close range by a hand help device via short range radio signals.

    And that woudl be neat if they were properly secure.. like i personally have to "will" the reading, like pilots can "will" those experimental planes to turn..
  • But what if you were cracked ?

  • Nonsense! The roadmap publishers are spearheading the coverup. Otherwise, their diabolical plan to take over the world while everyone is lost and trying to make sense of the maps will fail.

    When asked for comment, one roadmap spokesman simply replied "NARF!"

  • ...who had seen Simply Irresistible. Wow.
  • And who does the work to generate the future of biotechnology? Now the biologists working in sales. Not the chemists answering phones. The EE's.
  • Great, so now our own thoughts won't be secure! I wonder if I have to password protect my brain in case. OH! Probably won't happen because the U.S. Govt would want to find a way to get into my brain so that they can find out if I'm a terrorist or not.

    Shit. Lets just not GO there.

    sri
  • You can already download TriCorder II for your palm pilot. Check out tucows [pdacentral.com] Look down towards the bottom for Tricorder II.

    Now all I need is a legitimate reason to run around with a tricorder.
    Joseph Elwell.
  • Richard Preston describes prototype devices like this in the book (from the Navy, I think).
  • Dammit, Rob, I'm a computer programmer, not a doctor!!!

    I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.

    Forget tricorders, I want a space ship that can travel faster than the speed of light. Holodecks would be nifty, as well.

    -Eric

  • Not exactly a tricorder (Score:4)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Wednesday March 24, 1999 @09:33AM (#1964575) Journal
    This sounds interesting, but it's got nothing to do with a tricorder. It's talking about a mix of technologies including hybridization arrays like Affymetrix [affymetrix.com] makes, which involve isolating DNA, performing some reactions and then using the chip and a scanner to analyze the results. I saw a demo of Caliper's microfluidics a while ago and was really impressed - basically it's like a CPU with liquid reagents instead of electrons. It uses minuscule volumes, which makes it really quick, precise and efficient. Cool, but not a nonivasive diagnostic tool like a tricorder.

    Actually, a tricorder is more similar to CAT/PET/MRI imaging.



  • I thought McCoy's little spinny scanner was a salt shaker, but I could be wrong..

    Whatever this biomed stuff turns out to be, it's gotta be better than taking a needle or sucking down a pint of barium for a CT scan or MRI or whatever they make you take that nasty stuff for.
  • Yeah, nearly forgot about the dye.. I remember vaguely having to have a scan of some kind done when I was a kid, they shot my arm up with a horse-sized syringe full of some really painful stuff.. they claimed the only reason it was painful was because the dumb bitch nurse missed the vein and squirted the crap basically everywhere in my arm but where it was supposed to go. They also told me I broke the nurse's nose. In two places. And then they wanted me to let them try again.. bastards.

    I'd have given anything to have this kind of technology available back then..
  • Sorry, but it's early AM, and the There must be Gone To...


    Brings a whole new meaning to the term 'backdoor', eh?

    -or-

    And the USG, if they really thought you were a terrorist, would most likely either send you a Special Delivery Tomahawk, or use a more brute-force method of system entry.. 5.56mm packets running at 600fps all the way down your backbone and into your low-level processes..

    Sorry. =)
  • Doh! I was thinking rounds per minute.. told ya it was sleep-deprived..
  • It already exists :)

    Telporters exist and work fine.

    It's just there is a rather large conspiricy between the Oil companies, the Air-craft manufacturers, and the leading road/rail companies keeping technology like this under wraps.

    They know their whole existance will be futile when the truth gets out, so they are spending BILLIONS of dollars a year to have this sort of thing kept under wraps.
  • sex... huh??? what are ...sex... on about?

    I ..sex... *NEVER* let my thou...sex...ghts get interrupted by that sort...sex... of shit.

    It is all a matter ...sex... of self control :)
  • mmmmmmm.....

    I can't WAIT to see BackOrrifice for Brain 1.0


    Immagine the Cached password... keylogging... AND REMOTE CONTROL potential of that *evil laugh*

  • Gene Roddenberry made part of his deal Paramount say that if you invent something from the Star Trek, you are entitled to the name of what you invent.

    A group has already created the Tricorder and named it Mark I.

    Of course, it mostly takes atmospheric type of readings, its still pretty cool to know technology is moving.

    ---
  • Laff...

    Not nitpicking... Just thought the word misuse was amusing. I think the word you're looking for was invasive, not evasive.

    "Damnit! The glucometer got away again!"

  • I'm pretty sure that barium is for CT, not MRI. IIRC, CT uses computer controlled X-Rays to make pretty pictures, and the barium is opaque to x-rays.

    Or maybe I'm wrong. I know that some imaging techniques use radioactive dye, but I think that's for imaging blood vessels.

    The whole concept of MRIs fascinate me. Making images from upset hydrogen atoms...

  • Cool! More proof that life imitates art. Can't wait 'til the day we have teleporters that make a chiming sound and we dress all the stupid people in red shirts.

    Yikes, I hope it isn't like the red shirts in the first Star Trek. I don't wanna be one of the expendible people... :)

  • Cool! More proof that life imitates art. Can't wait 'til the day we have teleporters that make a chiming sound and we dress all the stupid people in red shirts.

    --Chihu
  • Not to be a geek or anything (yeah, right!)....

    But, the M-16 pushes a 55gr bullet significantly faster than 600fps. According to my old Barnes ballistics software a .223 Remington round (same as 5.56 NATO) using a 55gr bullet has a muzzle velocity of 3250fps.

  • style "*" focus_follows_right_eye
    style "*" focus_follows_left_eye
    style "*" focus_follows_nose
    style "*" SloppyFocus

    I prefer the latter myself. Nothing like reading in a window that you don't want to have focused.

    ~afniv
    "Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
    "We could be happy if the air was as pure as the beer"
  • Actually, i think the sensor parts they are talking about are the tiny ones that float around in your stomach or bloodstream, and other such implants. They would be able to be read from close range by a hand help device via short range radio signals.


    I've since read the article, and I was more or less correct about what they were talking about. The sensors would be about the size of an integrated circuit chip; while they could be implanted, they couldn't be sent into the bloodstream to drift. Their usefulness stems from their ability to precicely measure in parallel the concentrations of many very distinct chemicals, including DNA fragments.


    The other type of chip that they were talking about was again something the size of an integrated circuit chip, that had micromechanical chemical processing equipment on it. This too might be useful, but IMO is a bit farther away from practical fabrication and application.

  • Researcher has succesfully grow a living nerve cells on silicon chip.


    the chip has been able to read electrical pulse from the cell.


    Could you please give me the citation for this? I read about several experiments along these lines a while ago, but have since lost the article references. This is very annoying, because I'm doing a project in a related field, and have been trying to track down the articles again off and on for over a year :).


    Any help is appreciated.

  • we would need VERY fast network cards, to interpret brain waves/bioelectrical pulses into binary into networkable packet data...


    Not really. If you had a brain implant, then it would perform preprocessing to filter out only the information that it needed to transfer. This could be very large if you are doing a video feed to or from someone's visual cortex, or very low if you're just using a small area of the motor cortex to control a mouse.


    Transmitting the nerve signals generated with perfect fidelity probably isn't needed. Just the relevant information, which can be translated back into nerve signals by the implant.

  • Biological sensors and biological interfaces (Score:5)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Wednesday March 24, 1999 @09:18AM (#1964593)
    rde writes "This week's (print edition of) New Scientist tells us that Motorola's BioChip Systems Unit are building a biochip that "will eventually produce hand-held machines that can perform genetic tests or detect disease" -- a tricorder by any other name.


    Not by a fair margin, if they're talking about the kind of biological sensors that I've been hearing about. By combining biological components with integrated circuit chips, you can fabricate sensors on the chip that are sensitive to various complicated organic chemicals and the like - but you'd still have to do something like breathe on the chip or put a blood sample on the chip to get a reading. You can't just wave it at someone and get information.


    This kind of device does have many applications. Detailed organic chemical analysis right now requires some fairly expensive equipment (gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers, and IR and UV spectrometers). If you can do useful work with a smaller, cheaper component, then it will indeed quietly revolutionize substantial parts of the medical and forensic and chemical analysis industries. However, we're still a ways away from waving a lipstick container at somebody and getting a medical diagnosis. What this will mainly do is give you good quality readings on organic compounds suspended in a liquid or wafting through the air.


    I'll have to read the specific article in question before making more detailed comments.


    Darnit-I still need to know when I can put the network jack in my head. Writing all this e-mail through thought would be a lot nicer.


    This is being worked on. Prof. Kensall Wise has been publishing papers on neural interfaces for over a decade, and at least one other group exists doing similar things. Heck, _I_ hope to be doing similar things (my fourth-year project; I'll post a link once it's underway). Reading thoughts electronically is probably impractical, but there are still a number of nifty things that you can do with regards to interfacing with peripherals.

  • This kind of device does have many applications. Detailed organic chemical analysis right now requires some fairly expensive equipment (gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers, and IR and UV spectrometers). If you can do useful work with a smaller, cheaper component, then it will indeed quietly revolutionize substantial parts of the medical and forensic and chemical analysis industries.
    I remember hearing a couple of years ago that the Australians had built some kind of "artificial nose" (possibly Brynn Hibbert at UNSW?). There was a sound bite about its sensitivity, claiming it could detect a drop of something out of the volume of Sydney Harbor. References to this particular effort are now scarce on the web, but there are now many efforts on artificial or electronic noses. I recall that the Australian nose (and this probably applies to the current batch) could test for thousands of different substances in parallel. I think it was built with some kind of vlsi-fab-like process.

    If you can cheaply and easily test blood for thousands of different substances and get rough estimates of their concentrations, you can diagnose a huge number of different medical conditions. You'd probably prick a finger instead of waving a salt shaker. But if these things can be cost-reduced, they could be used in the home.

    A fantasy of mine is to see medical advances get swept into high gear as the open-source movement has done with software. When I mentioned this to somebody, he pointed out that medical advances require expensive lab equipment whereas computer science advances require only a desktop and a Linux CD. If there were cheap plentiful home blood analyzers, there could be open-source software for medical diagnosis, weight management, glucose management, etc. It might be interesting to have one's blood analyzer post results to the internet (with suitable security measures in place), where results could be compiled and analyzed for all kinds of useful data-gathering purposes. (A surprising amount of good medical advice is taken from the actuarial tables compiled by insurance companies.)

  • To hell with warp, lets get the transporters working first. I want instant transportation on this planet before high speeds to the next star system.
  • You don't need a network jack in your head to dictate your thoughts. There is already research underway for using external measurements of brainwaves for computer input (like mouse control). Sorry, but I don't have any links to relevant stories.

    Personally, I think that voice recognition and eye tracking (for mouse control, in particular) are the most promissing up and coming technologies for computer input.
  • we would need VERY fast network cards, to interpret brain waves/bioelectrical pulses into binary into networkable packet data... dont think 100Base T would be quite good enough... but when it does come, just think how good you'd be at Quake XIV!!!

  • Instant cancer treatment (Score:4)

    by dillon_rinker ( 17944 ) on Wednesday March 24, 1999 @09:31AM (#1964598) Homepage
    There was a story on NPR about this a few months back; the idea was that they would use chip fabrication technologies, but instead of making transistors and traces, they would make microscopic compartments and tubes to connect them, so you could have the equivalent of thousands of flasks on a chip to do complicated chemical analysis.

    On a different note, there are currently some really interesting cancer treatments being researched which use an individual's cancer cells to create antibodies which attack the cancer cells.

    So imagine this - you go see the doctor and he suspects cancer. He pulls out his tricorder, attaches a sterile hollow needle and pokes it into the suspected tumor. It sucks a few cells up into the chemchip. It analyzes them, determines they are malignant, creates antibodies for the cancer cells, and injects them through the needle. All in a few seconds. A red light comes on the tricorder, and the doctor tells you "Yes, that lump was cancerous, but it has been inoculated. You will notice some soreness and swelling in the area for a few days as the tumor subsides."
  • Red Herring's latest issue has a substancial bit in it on Tidal Wave's Orecchio, a dongle that sits around the ear like a hearing aid. their site is at www.thinkyourmail.com , but they don't have much there now. Probably best to wait for the RH issue to come out on the web.
  • Biochip arrays that detected differences in EXTRACTED DNA are cool, but not quite the same as waving something at someone and immediately having their sequence. Hybrid chip technology is well under development now, but tricoders......gimme a break! Science is exciting enough without exaggeration.
  • There's an article today that knight ridder wrote about using brainwaves for computer input. You can find the article in the Arizona Daily Star [azstarnet.com]
  • Yeah, he used salt shakers. Several types, in fact.

    But speaking of tricorders, I don't find the everything-in-a-pen type shown on that Voyager time travel episode very realistic. The interface just wouldn't be practical for anyone but the designers (in other words, it's a status symbol "my stick is better than yours"), whereas the standard palmtop-type tricorders would probably be used extensively for their friendlier appearance.

    I do believe that biochips could be easily used for something with is posited to sense bioelectric fields and the reflection of various energy types; just think how your nose feels after someone lightly rubs a steel nail against it.. usually, people tell me the bone tingles a little. And don't forget that birds home in partly via Earth's magnetic field.

    But how long would a biochip be good for, before it dies or becomes corrupted?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Network brain jacks?

    It may become reality the moment the corporate world(no country bias) works out how to push ads into your head while using a computer.
    "No# 2 Ebony Fluid of Life" - the thought of the next generation.

    Even worse, can you imagine being spammed like this? ;-(
  • That sounds all fine and good, but most of us have enough trouble stopping ourselves from SAYING something stoopid, all we need is:
    "in the I-did-it-already-dont-ask-me-again department, this story on OH SHIT THAT COFFEES HOT... damn, my favorite sailor moon shirt too... what was I doing?..."
    Really, we'll need some kind of filtering before we could implement that. We'va all seen the various sci-fi permutations, lots of authors have looked at that scenario, we'll have to do some real work on MENTAL discipline before we can do anything like that sucessfully.
    Keep trying for the T1 though...
  • Be careful which machines you crash with. Would want to be careful which machines you connect to. Wouldn't want to crash...

    Jwabbit
  • some swiss company created a handheld geologic survey item that did radiation testing ... spectrum analysis and some other stuff and called it the "Tricorder" was even approved by Gene Roddenbury's wife and its been allowed to use the name ... so technically this new bio sensor thing would be more like a medical tricorder or a Tricorder mark II
  • motorolla decided not to include that as they didnt want to relate it to star trek ... kinda stupid if you ask me ... they might have gotten more business.

  • Sex! (Score:1)

    by jrs ( 27486 )
    "Darnit-I still need to know when I can put the network jack in my head. Writing all this e-mail through thought would be a lot nicer. "

    Isn't it every 18 seconds male's think about sex? wonder what his emails would be like :)
  • I'm sure I saw a Pong game controlled by things taped (wossname) to your head on a science tv program years ago. Can't remember the details though.
  • Does anyone know the audio frequencies for the ST communicator or tricorder?
  • Check out tomorrow's Nature for more on thought dictation. The print version has a paper on communication of a short message using brain waves. Hopefully it'll be on the web edition as well http://www.nature.com/ . Hopefully before long I'll be able to junk my keyboard (I never really mastered this touch typing thing - Hey how bout a poll on typing speeds?) qs.dcu
  • Yeah those are The Communicators from the Kirk/Spock Era. I want a combadge damnit!

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