Virus-Detecting "Lab On a Chip" Developed At BYU 71
natharward writes "A new development in nano-level diagnostic tests has been applied as a lab on a chip that successfully screened viruses entirely by their size. The chip's traps are size-specific, which means even tiny concentrations of viruses or other particles won't escape detection. For medicine, this development is promising for future lab diagnostics that could detect viruses before symptoms kick in and damage begins, well ahead of when traditional lab tests are able to catch them. Aaron Hawkins, the BYU professor leading the work, says his team is now gearing up to make chips with multiple, progressively smaller slots, so that a single sample can be used to screen for particles of varying sizes. One could fairly simply determine which proteins or viruses are present based on which walls have particles stacked against them. After this is developed, Hawkins says, 'If we decided to make these things in high volume, I think within a year it could be ready.'"
uhh...... (Score:1, Funny)
what happens when the chip identifies humanity as a virus?
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You've been terminated, fucker.
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They may be the same story. Just different parts of it: Sofia Stewart [google.com].
Odd that Wikipedia seems to have eliminated the article about her claims.
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what happens when the chip identifies humanity as a virus?
Well, if you're keeping up on the news via Slashdot you'll find out about the destruction of mankind sometime around three months after the fact [deseretnews.com].
Ah Slashdot, one of the few places where the phrase "new news" isn't redundant and "old news" isn't clichéd.
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"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren't actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we... are the cure."
But this is ridiculous. Lot's of species do exactly this. It is quite difficult for species of any sort not to keep expanding until all resources are consumed, since each individual has an evolutionary incentive to do so. In fact, viruses and many other parasitical organisms are in some respects more restrained in some ways co
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I fail to see how you could come to that conclusion based on the contents of GPs post. Please substantiate your accusation.
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Well, if you insist on an answer: only an 'idiot' wouldn't know that a virus is much, much smaller than a human cell, and since the device from TFA identifies viruses by size (among other things) they wouldn't identify humans (or any other animal) as a virus.
> thanks for being dumb.
Oh man, its one of those days... (Score:4, Funny)
I read the whole summary twice thinking this had to do with computer viruses.
They even mention words like "Medicine" and "Proteins".
Oracle> INSERT "Monkeedude1212" INTO dual
AKA the Dummy table
Re:Oh man, its one of those days... (Score:4, Funny)
Obviously you haven't had your Jimmy Dean breakfast.
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What if your virus (biological) detecting chip gets a virus (computer)?
They will swap (hex)base pairs and result in a silicone/biological hybrid intent on destroying its human creators.
Sorta like Skynet.
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yep and this one is already full of holes.
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Maybe this was a troll, but I'll respond anyway. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (aka Mormons) do believe that God created the Earth. Which is "creationism". However most LDS folks also believe in evolution (e.g. as part of God's creation) and BYU was one of the very first schools to teach evolution. Last year BYU had a big, well-publicized week-long celebration of Darwin's birthday that included many lectures on the importance of the discovery of evolution.
That's not "Creationism
Different Kinds of Creationists (Score:2)
So no, I don't think it's correct to call LDS people "creationists" by any means, because that lumps them in with all the 6000-year-old-Earth fundie Christians...
I think the distinction you're looking for is Young Earth Creationism [wikipedia.org]. There's also Old Earth Creationists, who may or may not believe in theistic evolution.
To be fair, LDS have their own wacky beliefs (that God/Jehovah is but one god of many, and lives on the planet Kolob,
*shrug* Once you believe in a supernatural, one set of beliefs isn't parti
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*shrug* Once you believe in a supernatural, one set of beliefs isn't particularly more wacky than the next, just more or less familiar.
Wrong. There's a big difference, to me, between beliefs which cannot be proven or disproven, and beliefs which are blatantly disproven by available physical evidence. If someone believes that a "god" lives on some other planet, ok, that sounds pretty wacky to me, but there's no way for me to disprove that, at least not now when we have no manned spaceflight and certainly n
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Wrong. There's a big difference, to me, between beliefs which cannot be proven or disproven, and beliefs which are blatantly disproven by available physical evidence.
Yes and no - I agree that if I had to choose between the two I would choose the former, but both are products of poor reasoning. If the only rational defence someone has of their viewpoint is that it has not been disproven than I can't really respect that kind of reasoning.
Your examples of insane excuses are also things that cannot be proven - yet you dismiss these, while partially defending equitable (from a rational point of view) views about gods that live on other planets, talking to people etc. Thi
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(Full disclosure, I'm an Agnostic, I don't believe in ID or Creationism, but was raised Mormon)
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Mormons are Intelligent Design believers
No, they certainly are not. Perhaps you should have paid a little more attention in sunday school.
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ID is not an excuse to teach creationism, as thought up by clever bible-thumpers. It is merely a heresy, crafted by perverting religion to meet a perverted science. It should be treated as such, and not used as a reason to hate anything but ID. Mormonism, as a religion, rejects ID. You might find a few
This will never work (Score:3, Interesting)
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My wife keeps telling me that size doesn't matter
Who is she trying to convince?
Artificial immune system (Score:3, Interesting)
How about an implant which selectively traps virus particles, incinerates them and releases their component molecules?
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But does it run linux? (Score:4, Funny)
That way you wouldn't need to worry about vir...
Oh,
sorry.
Fascinating (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fascinating (Score:5, Informative)
None of these things were invented by Star Trek. Maybe they were, as you say "shown there" but these ideas have been common in SF since at least the 1940s and quite likely a lot longer.
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What is more amazing is that the technology was in fact invented at a Mormon school, and as everyone knows, Battlestar Galactica is the obligatory connection.
So this story is really not about virus detection, but over whether or not Star Trek is really stealing technology from Battlestar Galactica!!
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The medical technology shown on BSG was really rather primitive, compared to what you'd expect for a civilization that's had interstellar spaceflight for 2000 years and also had FTL drive and artificial gravity. Their sickbay didn't look much more advanced than what we currently have; I believe they even had what appeared to be a simple MRI machine, which the Dr. used to examine Baltar's head.
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Magic Underwear (Score:1, Funny)
Does this come with a free set of the magic underwear, or does that have to be bought separately?
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Does this come with a free set of the magic underwear, or does that have to be bought separately?
Since when is this funny? Religious bigotry isn't any less so because it's Slashdot.
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Yea, the reactor does exist, but it was shut down decades ago. It was used for nuclear decay/isotope sorts of experiments. It was never even close to having a critical mass.
Okay guys... (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks like we have a namespace collision here.
I propose the following solution: All references to 'virus' should now point to one of the following (as appropriate).
Meatspace::virus
Bitspace::virus
That'll solve a lot of confusion (and render almost every single "Funny"-modded post in this thread irrelevant)
Thanks.
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Nah, computer viruses should just be called virii. It's a differentiation AND it'll annoy all the grammEr nazis. It's double plus good!
Re:what about cinnamon (Score:5, Informative)
Probably none.
Normal animal cell size: 10-30 micrometers
Normal plant cell size: 10-100 micrometers
Normal virus size: 10-300 nanometers
Not to mention the gap in the detector is smaller than plant and animal cells entirely:
They formed the third dimension by placing a 50 nanometer-thin layer of metal onto the chip, then topping that with glass deposited by gasses. Finally they used an acid to wash away the thin metal, leaving the narrow gap in the glass as a virus trap.
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flour, sugar, cinnamon, pepper, powdered dry wall, chalk dust, cocaine, nutmeg, etc.
That would certainly explain why I like girl scout cookies so much...
I had the same thought yesterday (Score:2)
DNA microarrays are likely highly superior (Score:3, Interesting)
DNA microarrays (also know as DNA chips) can already identify every virus ever discovered, and it can even identify undiscovered viruses by recognizing genetic sequences that are highly conserved among viruses. This type of chip first proved its worth in 2003 when it was used to identify SARS. The New York Times interviewed the inventor Joseph DeRisi about it [nytimes.com]:
It is not yet evident what, if any, advantage this other chip that hopes to identify viruses by their size will have.
it's about money... (Score:4, Interesting)
This technology is a glass sieve.. modern technology can do this cheaply at scale.
The awesome factor is that a raman spectrometer could probably be used to nail down some of the ambiguities for similar sized proteins. As a thin glass layer will be transparent, and the samples are in predefined locations. Since youve got to optically scan the sample anyway, why not get a raman read in the process.
And the data analysis is much more straightforward.. with a genechip, you look for a specific pattern, which may be weird if you have viruses in a sample. Where size sorting gets single on-off data points which indicate a virus of size-x which will correspond to one (possibly more) viruses.. it narrows the search pretty fast if you have yes-no answers. Plus you can do a targeted microarray when you have a narrow search field. But most of the time - sorting cold from flu from ebola and hiv is enough.
I kinda suspect that this might be pretty quick to run, as the virus only needs to move a minute (.005-.5mm-ish id supose) amount, and an ultracentrifuge can make short work of sorting much larger samples that need to separate proteins by a few millimeters. But hey, what do I know?
Storm
several questions (Score:2)
Ok, so I read the article--unsurprisingly it was light on the details. The sieve idea is good, but a few questions come to mind,
1) How are you going to do the actual virus identification? Most of the current techniques require an amplification step because you need enough signal to measure. It is great to be able to isolate small amounts, but not if you can't do anything with it. Morphological identification is one way to go, but you can only get species information that way (sometimes). You can't get strai
To think that I'm still using checksums! (Score:2)