I want one of these. There’s more here; the sheer coolth of a USB-based PCR analyser is hard to beat. Even if the potential for Wakefield-scale contamination fuckups is not to be denied.
In general, I’m trying to get up to speed on things biotech. it is true that, so far, cyberpunk has been a strategically undervalued source of science fiction, politics, and general weirdness – we keep thinking we’ve got to the end of computers and networks, only to find there’s more weird out there – compared to biology and nanotech, which has been a bit jam-tomorrow, always promising the revolution in five years’ time. I suspect this is changing, not least in the light of this and this.
That’s going to be quite a boat trip for one little robot, if not a giant step for mankind for quite a while. We might have to declare Titan a planetary nature reserve, if they don’t do it to us first.