A researcher working under an Office of Naval Research grant is just a couple of months away from completing a prototype detector designed to sound an alarm when airborne microbes such as anthrax are in the air.
Dr. Jeanne Small, a biophysicist and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Eastern Washington University in (Cheney, WA), has come up with a detector that continuously samples the air, offering analysis in under a half-hour. "Our research showed that common substances such as road dust and soot behaved differently than bacteria," Small said.