"It's simple, very fast… and you have a system that is six orders of magnitude more sensitive than anything out there," Mirkin explains. "It is going to provide many opportunities in terms of developing new tests for new diseases, and creating tests that allow us to follow and treat existing diseases in a much more efficient manner." ...

As reported in Discover magazine, they created tiny gold nano-particles — hundreds of thousands of time smaller than the width of a human hair. When the particles are released in a blood, urine, or saliva sample taken from a patient, the genetic material latches on to any disease proteins they find. Proteins, the building blocks of living things, can serve as fingerprints for diseases.

"The nano-particle is coded with many strands of DNA which are identical, which are the barcodes," Mirkin explains. "When the nano-particle binds to the protein target of interest, it releases these mini barcodes for every protein molecule that is in solution, so that you're getting amplification," allowing the researchers to easily scan for disease with currently available DNA detection techniques.

"We have a chip that has many different spots of DNA on it that are designed to recognize all of the possible barcodes that are in the mixture," Mirkin says. "It binds the right spot and provides a signal that can be easily read with a screener."

Malmstrom, a visiting scholar at the U.S. Air Force Academy, now thinks he recognizes that face. It's Mommy -- or at least the image of a "prototypical female face" that's hard-wired into a baby's brain and helps newborns instantly respond to their mothers.

Scientists have known for years that animals are born with certain visual recognition "templates" that help them survive. In one famous study, a scientist found that newly hatched chickens automatically cowered from shadows in the shape of a predator (such as a hawk) while the shadow of a non-predator -- a goose -- elicited only yawns (or the chick equivalent).

There's similar evidence that human babies are programmed to react to a generalized face. Studies show that up until 2 months of age, an infant will react favorably to anything resembling a human face -- even a Halloween mask -- while showing little consistent interest in other shapes.

The key, researchers have concluded, is the eyes and nose. A newborn's blurry vision tends to soften facial features and smudge the eyes into large dark blobs. In fact, when Malmstrom optically altered a photo of a woman in a way consistent with the characteristics of a newborn's vision -- astigmatism, an extremely shallow focal plane -- the resulting face looked remarkably like those big-eyed aliens drawn by self-declared abductees, he reports in the latest issue of the magazine Skeptic, which features scholarly articles on the paranormal and other extraordinary claims.