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Pills that phone home. I’m Bob Hirshon and this is Science Update.
Over 200,000 people die each year from not taking their medicine as directed, according to a University of Arizona report. A team from the University of Florida hopes to change that with the introduction of a smart pill. It contains a microchip smaller than a grain of sand that contacts your doctor to report that it’s been swallowed.
In other health nanotechnology, scientists at the University of Edinburgh have developed tiny gold-plated probes so small they could fit inside a single cell. The idea is to implant them into diseased cells in living patients, so the probes could monitor the progress of the disease at a molecular level, and transmit the data to doctors. I’m Bob Hirshon for AAAS, the Science Society.