Cell Phone Blood Scanner

Bet your iPhone can’t do this…. UCLA scientists have found a way to rig an ordinary cell phone, an LED, a light filter and some wiring together, Wired reports, into a cheap and easy blood scanner that can detect HIV and malaria, among other diseases:

UCLA researcher Dr. Aydogan Ozcan images thousands of blood cells instantly by placing them on an off-the-shelf camera sensor and lighting them with a filtered-light source (coherent light, for you science buffs). The filtered light exposes distinctive qualities of the cells, which are then interpreted by Ozcan’s custom software.

Found [via].