Portable High-Resolution NMR Sensor Demonstrated at Berkeley - MedGadget - www.medgadget.com
This is one of those little inventions that has the possibility to change the world. NMR is a technology which can unambigously identify a material and the components thereof. Today, the only way to get that material tested is to grind it up and take it to a very large lab where very powerful magnets will test the material. This is all well and good, but it takes a damn long time to do it (get time on the machine, run the test, etc etc). The author calls out the interesting facets of this new invention in that you could have one of these machines in your back room at the airport, but now that it's getting smaller and the amount of energy required to run the test is much lower, expect that you'll be able to run this stuff in a portable (hand held) format in 10 years or so. That means on the field MRIs during sports events, or scanning every shipping container that comes through or a hundred other things. Very neat!