pH

Patches of tiny needles have already been shown to effectively deliver medications painlessly, and without a bloody mess. Now the tiny needles could also be used to monitor body chemistry in real time.

The new tech, developed by a team of biomedical engineers out of North Carolina State University, the University of California at San Diego, and Sandia National Laboratories, employs electrochemical sensors in the hollow channels of microneedles to detect certain molecules. The researchers reported their findings in the chemistry journal Talanta.

Current body chemistry monitoring involves taking samples, often before or after an event. Wearable micro-sensors, on the … Read more

Addressing a major weakness its plan to build its WebM video technology into the Web, Google yesterday released a version of its VP8 video encoder and decoder designed to be baked into hardware.

The hardware implementation of VP8 is called H1 and now Anthill, said Aki Kuusela, engineering manager of the WebM Project, in a blog post. It comes in the form of RTL, or Register Transfer Language, a very low-level description close to how processors actually perform their instructions, and it's available royalty free.

"The H1 hardware encoder can produce good quality with very low power consumption … Read more

Our breath can say a lot about us--and not just what we had for lunch.

Engineers at the University of Florida are reporting that they have designed a tiny and affordable sensor that can do what has up until now been considered impossible: detect glucose (as well as pH and alkalinity) levels in breath condensate.

Fan Ren, professor of chemical engineering and a researcher for this project, says that the team's most recent research, published in the January issue of IEEE Sensors Journal, upsets long-held assumptions that glucose levels in breath are too small for accurate readings; the sensor, … Read more