NASA has a cancer sniffing cell phone
Dan Seitz 
Jing Li is a woman you might someday owe your life to. That’s because she’s figured out a way to install a gadget onto a cell phone that can figure out whether you have cancer just by breathing on it.
Yes, soon you could make a phone call and hang up only to discover your phone thinks you have cancer. Isn’t technology wonderful?
Joking aside, this is actually a pretty big deal, because these sensors are small, power-sipping, cheap…and incredibly effective.
How does it work? Your breath can reflect a lot of things about your health in its chemical composition. For example, if you have lung cancer, you’ll have higher concentrations of nitrous oxide in your breath. We’re not talking about you becoming Laughing Gas Man, we’re talking tiny, tiny amounts.
It does this with nanosensors; 32 of them, in fact, all on a chip the size of a postage stamp. Each sensor reacts to different chemicals in different ways. As those reactions occur, changes in how current flows through the sensors can be recorded and used to diagnose different diseases, such as diabetes.
This is huge because these sensors have been proven to catch disease early enough for treatment to be less invasive, painful and expensive. The potential for health-care savings alone is enormous, not to mention that whole “extending the natural life span of a human being” thing we’re supposed to care about. And it’s cheap and small enough to be put into your smartphone.
In short, NASA just saved a lot of lives. Your tax dollars at work!
This Is NASA’s Cancer-Sniffing Cellphone Sensor [Gizmodo]
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