Sort of amazing that lasers are still effective buzzwords. They’re ancient enough tech now that it’s like saying “we’re going to analyze blood with the power of… ELECTRICITY”. Gee, maybe they can burn the lab results to a CD-ROM with a… LASER.
AI, yeah, that’s pretty new. A good, robust, buzzword. I’m disappointed that they didn’t trot out quantum computing, though.
I know somebody who worked for a few years on a laser blood-scanning device. It worked, sort of, but it was scanning through the skin (that was the whole point), and the skin is too variable – if they cranked up the gain, they got burns.
FWIW, a laser pulse oximeter is going through FDA approval now? – existing ones use LEDs?
Lasers are great. Lots of uses for blood testing and otherwise. And I’m sure there are plenty of uses that haven’t been thought of yet as they apply to blood testing. There are probably dozens of medical startups using lasers as some fundamental part of their tech.
It’s just that in this case, an obvious con, I find it funny that lasers are such mundane tech that they’re almost an anti-buzzword. Surely they could have come up with something better. You actually want to scare away the non-rubes since they ask difficult questions.
I know, I know! [waves hand madly for teacher to see]
We’re incorporating nano-PELS in our new blood machine! They emit special nano-light at nano-meter wavelengths. Sooo much better than the regular kind of ordinary light.
Ordinary visible light is at nanometer wavelengths. That’s the point of my joke. A classic 60w incandescent bulb is a nano-PELS. Just with a much more investor hype-able name
Sorta. I see your point but for most engineering uses we use the powers of a thousand. So the choices are kilometers, meters, millimeters, micrometers, nanometers, or picometers.
Visible light is ~400-700 nanometers. We certainly could say it’s 0.4-0.7 micrometers. Or 400,000 - 700,000 picometers. The first of those choices is IMO best. By that logic, visible light is nanometer scale.
Now it is true that between kilo- and milli- we also define hecto-, deca-, deci-, and centi-. But those are exceptions to the general rule of powers of thousands, not of tens. And interestingly, deca- and deci- are almost unused.
I don’t live in a metric / SI country. I’m not sure whether folks in those countries find it most natural to describe a typical adult male as 1.85 meters tall, 18.5 decameters, or 185 centimeters. ISTM I see more examples like “1.85m” but I may be mistaken. For sure 1850 millimeters or 0.00185 kilometers would be silly.
Wait, wait, you haven’t heard of their other technologies yet! They also have Fluorescent Resonance And Ultrafast Detection. And Photonic Holography Of Neodymium-Yttrium. Not to mention their research in other areas, like their Superconducting Cryogenic Alloy Magnet.