Tricorder

Here’s a common childhood indulgence, influenced by the seminal Star Trek. While we spent afternoons communicating with our ‘away team’ firing make-believe lasers, another device, perhaps a little less popular than the communicator or the phaser gun, was the tricorder. Dr. McCoy or science office Spock would frequently use this strange black box to perform tasks ranging from health diagnosis to analysis of alien soil and air. While the tricorder as it was presented in Star Trek is still largely fiction, research towards that has already produced a device that looks like an early prototype to the tricorder. Researchers of Purdue University have created a portable system that can be used to analyze chemical components. Called the Mini 10, this prototype is essentially a portable mass spectrometer, roughly the size of a shoebox; weighing in at 10 kilograms. Running on battery power, the unit weighs 30 times less than a conventional mass spectrometer has applications in everything from airport security to medical diagnostics.