Credit card sized diagnostic tools
Researchers at the University of Utah have been able to replicate technology commonly reserved for hard drives to test for infectious diseases; using the principle of giant magnetoresistance (GMR), which states that the electrical resistance of a particle will change when an external magnetic field is applied.
Using this technology, small samples of blood, urine, or saliva can be injected into a credit card sized device and infectious diseases have the potentional to be detected. This technology could further lead to increased point-of-care diagnostics with testing times on the order of minutes compared to hours.
Preliminary prototypes have shown that the technology is sensitive enough to detect 800 microscopic particles in a given sample. However researchers Marc Porter and Michael Granger believe with further modification single particles have the potential to be detected.
More can be found in the release here.