A PUFF of exhaled air could give an early warning of lung disease by morphing a liquid into gel.
Tuberculosis, lung cancer and influenza all raise levels of nitric oxide (NO) in the breath. At present, sophisticated machinery is needed to test for NO.
Now , a chemist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and her colleagues are developing a cheaper test. They have shown that NO oxidises a solution of the compound dihydropyridine, changing the shape of its molecules so that they stack together to form a solid gel – a change that can…
