Global Intellect

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
LOS ANGELES, California – In the very near future, drawing blood may be obsolete. Instead, implants will be able to image your blood and monitor it constantly.
This is because scientists at Caltech have squeezed a microscope onto a computer chip not much larger than a dime. And that’s just the demo unit.
Shrinking a standard microscope to this size is practically impossible due to the layers of optics involved, but Caltech professor Changhuei Yang decided to skip the optics altogether and put microscopic samples almost directly onto a photo sensor chip — just like the one found in your cheap point-and-shoot.
The microscope-on-a-chip uses standard, off-the-shelf hardware sensors with a clever modification — pixels on the sensor are forced to only look through microscopic holes, which allows the chip to image very tiny things. The standard hardware makes future mass production cheap and easy and Yang’s lab […]

Original post by Dave Bullock