Smart label could one day let you know when to toss food and cosmetics

Smart label could one day let you know when to toss food and cosmetics Smart labels for cosmetics and food could one day tell consumers when to throw a product out. Credit: Silvana Andreescu Detecting food and cosmetic spoilage and contamination. Identifying new medicinal plants in a remote jungle. Authenticating tea and wine. Scientists have developed a low-cost, portable, paper-based sensor that can potentially carry out all of these functions with easy-to-read results. The researchers are presenting their results today at the 254th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS, the world's largest scientific society, is holding the meeting here through Thursday. It features nearly 9,400 presentations on a wide range of science topics. "I've always been interested in developing technologies that are accessible to both industry and the general population," Silvana Andreescu, Ph.D., says. "My lab has built a versatile sensing platform that incorporates all the needed reagents for detection in a piece of paper. At the same time, it is adaptable to different targets, including food contaminants, antioxidants and free radicals that indicate spoilage." What sets Andreescu's sensors apart from others, she says, are the nanostructures they use to catch and bind to compounds they're looking for. "Most people working on similar sensors use solutions that migrate on channels," Andreescu says. "We use stable, inorganic particles that are redox active. When they interact with the substances we want to detect, they change color, and the intensity of the change tells us how concentrated the analyte is." Additionally, because all of the reagents needed to operate the device are incorporated in the paper, users don't need to add anything other than the sample being tested. The potential applications are wide-ranging. For example, much of her sensor work thus far has focused on detecting antioxidants in tea and wine. Andreescu, who's at Clarkson University, and her colleagues have found that these products have unique antioxidant "fingerprints" that could be used for authentication purposes. The portable sensor could also be used by researchers exploring remote locations, such as the Amazon rainforest, in search of natural sources of antioxidants, she notes. More recently, Andreescu extended her work to root out food contamination and environmental pollutants. One sensor prototype can spot ochratoxin A, a fungal toxin commonly found in a range of products, including cereals and coffee. She says this direction could be expanded further to look for salmonella and E. coli. Now, her team is taking the work in yet another direction, developing paper-based devices that change color as cosmetics and food go bad. These sensors bind to the reactive oxygen species that products accumulate as they age and eventually spoil. Although testing for this application is still ongoing, Andreescu says this technology could one day be incorporated into smart labels that would tell consumers when to throw a product out. Explore further: Silk could improve sensitivity, flexibility of wearable body sensors Smart labels could tell you when to toss food and makeup, as this video shows By Giorgia GuglielmiAug. 21, 2017 , 5:00 AM Is it safe to eat the leftover cheese in the fridge or put on the eye shadow that has been in your cabinet for several years? A smart label could help. That’s the hope of a team of researchers who have developed a new sensor containing nanostructures that change color when they bind to compounds that indicate spoilage or contamination by bacteria. Whereas currently available sensors use liquid solutions that migrate on channels, the newly developed sensor has all the reagents incorporated in a postage stamp–sized piece of paper. This means it can be directly applied to the samples that have to be tested; for example, it could be added to makeup packaging or dabbed onto leftover food. The researchers, who will present their results today at the 254th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C., have already used the paper sensor to detect antioxidant compounds in tea and wine, which could be used for authentication purposes. But the sensor, they add, could also be used to identify new medicinal plants or natural sources of antioxidants in remote areas such as the Amazon rainforest. Facebook is working on futuristic smart glasses — here are new details Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the end-goal for AR is lightweight glasses that display virtual objects in the real world. Getty Facebook is hard at work on the technical breakthroughs needed to ship futuristic smart glasses that can let you see virtual objects in the real world. A patent application for a "waveguide display with two-dimensional scanner" was published on Thursday by three members from the advanced research division of Facebook's virtual-reality subsidiary, Oculus. The display "may augment views of a physical, real-world environment with computer-generated elements" and "may be included in an eye-wear comprising a frame and a display assembly that presents media to a user’s eyes," according to the filing. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called virtual and augmented reality the next major computing platform capable of replacing smartphones and traditional PCs. Facebook purchased Oculus for $2 billion in 2014 and plans to spend billions more on developing the technology. Facebook/USPTO The smart glasses being developed by Oculus will use a waveguide display to project light onto the wearer's eyes instead of a more traditional display, according to Thursday's patent. The smart glasses would be able to display images, video, and work with connected speakers or headphones to play audio when worn. Facebook declined to comment on the patent. By using waveguide technology, Facebook is taking a similar approach to Microsoft's HoloLens AR headset and the mysterious glasses being developed by the Google-backed startup Magic Leap. One of the authors of the patent is, in fact, lead Oculus optical scientist Pasi Saarikko, who joined Facebook in 2015 after leading the optical design of the HoloLens at Microsoft. While work is clearly being done on the underlying technology for Facebook's smart glasses now, don't expect to see the device anytime soon. Michael Abrash, the chief scientist of Oculus, recently said that AR glasses won't start replacing smartphones until as early as 2022. "20 or 30 years from now, I predict that instead of carrying stylish smartphones everywhere, we’ll wear stylish glasses," he said at Facebook's developer conference earlier this year. "Those glasses will offer VR, AR and everything in between, and we’ll use them all day." SEE ALSO: Facebook's next big thing is augmented reality, says Mark Zuckerberg NOW WATCH: These smartglasses could replace your desktop computer — here's what they're like