Speaking as a chemist, I have to go with a tricorder. Those little gizmos can tell you everything about anything in a matter of seconds. The entire field of analytical chemistry can be made obsolete overnight by one handheld device, and thousands of labtechs will be put out of work.
The most time-consuming part of research after multi-hour reactions is figuring out what exactly is in the goo you made. This often involves very complicated, very expensive instrumentation. Being able to wave a tricorder over the flask and know the concentration of everything in it is a huge time-saver, plus I imagine it would be able to image my nanoparticles in situ, so I wouldn't have to haul them halfway across the city and wash all the protecting ligands off in order to be able to look at them with the electron microscope.
Next up: purification techniques. What I wouldn't give for transporter chromatography: dematerialise a sample, and then rematerialise it with all the various compounds in different beakers.
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The first run through of any experimental procedure is to identify any potential errors by making them.
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12-02-2006, 07:59 PM
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