For many years now, R&D Magazine has given its R&D 100 Awards, also known as "The Oscars of Invention," to the most innovative ideas of the year. The winners will be announced in the September issue of the magazine, but they already have been notified by -- guess what? -- fax. This year, the Department of Energy (DOE) labs have won 29 awards, and four of them went to Livermore Nat'l Lab (LLNL). Here I've chosen to focus on one of these awards, the bioaerosol mass spectrometer (BAMS). "BAMS has the potential to identify bioagents, such as anthrax, from only a single spore or cell and to clarify the molecular changes that occur in normal and cancerous cells." But read more.
Below is a diagram showing this bioaerosol mass spectrometry (BAMS) system used to analyze bacterial spores and identify bioagents, such as anthrax, from only a single spore or cell (Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory).
Here are some more details from the LLNL news release.
Using a laser to peel cells apart and a mass spectrometer to identify the chemicals inside, BAMS can identify airborne pathogens at the single-cell level in about 100 milliseconds. Combining an understanding of laser-particle interactions, the biochemistry of bacteria and mass spectrometry analysis, BAMS is a prototype system that can identify pathogens and differentiate between harmful anthrax spores and benign agents.
BAMS is designed for operation in office buildings that could be targets for a terrorist attack using a biological agent such as anthrax, or at ports of entry such as airports or train stations to monitor for potential epidemic diseases. Future biomedical applications could include rapid detection of respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis and SARS.
As you can easily guess, there are not many reference papers which have been published about this technology. But you can still read two previous articles published by Science & Technology Review, a LLNL publication.
After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is. Though feminists have been arguing for years that there is a self-defining female energy, and a female libido that is not expressed merely in response to demands by the male, and a female way of being and of experiencing the world, we are still not close to understanding what it might be. Yet every mother who has held a girl child in her arms has known that she was different from a boy child and that she would approach the reality around her in a different way.... She is a female and she will die female, and though many centuries should pass, archaeologists would identify her skeleton as the remains of a female creature.
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
Here are the links to "When Every Second Counts: Pathogen Identification in Less Than a Minute" (September 2003) and "Life at the Nanoscale" (May 2004). The first one gives additional details on the BAMS technique.
The premise of a detect-to-warn system is to allow time to react. "A minute gives people enough time to put on masks, leave the room, hold their breath. The challenge was to actually make a device that could provide answers in less than a minute," explains Livermore chemist Eric Gard.
The BAMS technique, which Gard and others have been working on for nearly five years, can successfully identify a single airborne particle in about 100 milliseconds. This technique has other applications as well, Gard notes. "In the future, BAMS could also be used as a medical diagnostic to, for instance, track small subpopulations of cancerous cells that deviate from their normal development cycle. As such, BAMS may make far-reaching contributions in the fields of oncology, microbiology, and public health."
The other article from Science & Technology Review discusses other techniques, but gives a very short summary of the missions of the Livermore’s BioSecurity and Nanosciences Laboratory (BSNL).
One of BSNL’s most important research goals is developing fast, sensitive, and accurate instruments to detect and identify a wide range of pathogens. In the area of airborne pathogen detection, Livermore researchers have worked with colleagues at the University of California (UC) at Davis to develop the bioaerosol mass spectrometer (BAMS). BAMS combines advanced laser desorption and ionization techniques with mass spectrometry, and its sensitivity is two to three times greater than that of other laser ionization techniques. In addition, BAMS's response time is fast -- it can identify a single airborne particle in about 100 milliseconds.
Sources: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory news release, July 11, 2005; and various web sites
Nonwhite and working-class women, if they are ever to identify with the organized women’s movement, must see their own diverse experiences reflected in the practice and policy statements of these predominantly white middle-class groups.
—Kimberly Crenshaw (b. 1959)
Related stories can be found in the following categories.
Biotechnology
Chemistry
Innovation
Medicine
Military Apps.