Needle-free blood testing: faster and less expensive Jesmeen Duo Team Member D: you hate blood tests? Even better, do you have a crippling phobia of needles, causing you to avoid them at all costs and consequently get dirty looks from health- care professionals? Well, the future is near. Needle-free blood tests are already here. The company is called Theranos, and the CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, made the 2014 Forbes 400 list. As Forbes reported, Holmes and her company recently developed a way to conduct the full range of medical tests from just a pinprick, and a tiny drop of blood. That’s right- -no more needles, pain or bruises! It’s also incredibly inexpensive. To give you an idea, their website gives estimations for various tests. A test for iron (a common one for anemia screening) is $4.45 with Theranos; a conventional test for iron is about $55 according to the American company Health Testing Centers. Due to its simplicity, Theranos testing can also potentially reduce the number of medical errors and results are fast. No wonder Theranos has grown into a multi- billion dollar company over the past ten years. But how does this process work? When (lucky) Americans go into their local Theranos clinic for a blood test, the technician will apply a warm wrap to their hand to increase blood flow to the area and draw a few droplets of blood from the capillaries at the end of their hand. This sample is put into what Holmes calls a ‘nanotainer’. Then this sample gets sent off to the lab, where Theranos’ pride and joy--their patented microfluidic technology--can react with multiple analytes (the specific substance in the blood that is being measured/tested) in a single sample with several reagents. These reactions yield detectable signals that can be measured in the lab to determine quantities of a substance in the blood. That may seem like a bunch of mumbo- jumbo, but at the end of the day, a patient’s data is ready to go, faster and easier than ever before. Holmes emphasizes the fact that her company, located in Silicon Valley, is not only in the field of medical engineering, but also keeps an emphasis on technology. She maintains that the patient should have better access to information and should have full ownership over the data concerning their body. Unlike conventional medical companies, Theranos has a leading edge in the way of technology. For example, they can send a patient’s results wirelessly to their cell phone, rather than waiting weeks for paperwork. All these positive things about Theranos have many clamouring for it. However, there is a small section of people who have taken pause and considered what other kind of practical implications this kind of revolutionary nanotechnology could have. As the San Francisco Business Times reported, the board at Theranos has a curiously large number of military personnel on it, which begs the question: is Theranos on the lookout for ways to apply their technology on the front lines? Even more curiously, Theranos is notorious secretive, ignoring inquiries about what they are currently working on and reportedly even avoiding benign questions about Holmes’ age in the past (she is 29 years old). Theranos is obviously an intriguing company, their technology even more so. It cannot be argued that, whatever way Theranos chooses to go in the future, their next move could change the world; but to what end remains to be seen. In the meantime, we'd like to see Holmes work on a way of applying her nanotech to flu shots! News 13 Safer travel: the Hyperloop Mani Samani Team Member hat is the fastest way you can get from Prince George to Vancouver, never crashing and immune to weather, in about 40 minutes at a price of $20 for a one-way trip? Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors and SpaceX has revealed a solar-powered, city-to-city elevated transit system. The idea is a “hyperloop” that transports passengers in a capsule enclosed inside of steel tubes. Musk describes his design as a shotgun with the tubes running side by side for most of the journey and closing the loop at either end with a speed of 800 miles per hour. Hyperloop will be fundamentally different. It uses twenty-first century technologies to move you from city to city safely and without delay, while reducing aviation’s environmental impact. The whole system would be powered by solar panels installed on the tubes that effects on reducing fuel usages, emissions, and noise as well as reducing travel time. We are fast approaching a global air transport crisis, as more need to travel faster and farther than ever before. Today’s aircrafts will not be able to cope with ever-increasing numbers of passengers and cargo for local and overseas travels. The high-tech alternatives, such as rocket ships and space planes we have been promised, are still in the realms of science fiction. Airasia’s QZ8501 crash in the final days of 2014 was terrifying, disconcerting, and sadly fatal for the 162 passengers and crew on board. When travelling by air, you expect safety and convenience at a reasonable price and without delays. For many years, airplanes have been the safest way to get to your destination. According to The New York Times, a traveler could statistically fly every day for 123,000 years and still be safe. Although travel death statistics have promised that airplanes are the safest transit vehicle, fatal air accidents are still taking a huge number of lives every year. Based on statistics published on PlaneCrashInfo.com, 2014 recorded the highest number of mortality in four years. Demand on aviation services has never been higher, and it is growing at a phenomenal rate, but the current air traffic system is at its limit. Flying from airport to airport takes longer today than it anytime in the past decade because of congestion on the ground and in the sky. This amount of air traffic has a huge impact on the environment. The David Suzuki Foundation published an article stating that aviation has a disproportionately large impact on the climate system, which accounts for four to nine percent of the total climate change impact of human activity. We need a clean method of high-speed transportation. The good news is it is already happening. The distance between where we are and where we want to go shrinks every day as new technology is put into place. As these new capabilities become more pervasive, travel prices are going to drop.