SCANNING FOR LIFE FORMS
Star Trek fans now only lack a phaser after tech company Consumer Physics has pretty much made the "tricorder" a reality.
The Israeli company says its SCiO handheld scanner can analyze the molecular makeup of any object that it has in its growing database.
It says the tiny device, which it hopes can be installed directly in a smartphone, can do the work currently limited to a spectrometer in a laboratory.
The small scanner works via a Bluetooth connection with a smartphone, which it turn compares the data received from an object with a cloud-based database.
Co-founder Dror Sharon demonstrated how the SCiO identifies different kinds of fruit, the nutritional content of cheese, verifies vitamins and even distinguishes between brand, generic and counterfeit Viagra.
The SCiO can be pre-ordered online for $250 dollars and will be on market in June.
