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Scientists Build World's Most Sensitive Scale
Adrian Bachtold at the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology in Barcelona has created the world's most sensitive scale. The new subatomic weight scale can measure masses as tiny as one yoctogram, less than the mass of a proton. From the article: "Bachtold hopes the scales could be used to distinguish different elements in chemical samples, which might differ only by a few protons. They might also diagnose health conditions by identifying proton-scale differences in molecular mass that are markers of disease."
...I thought that's what mass spectrometers were for.
They are. High resolution mass specs measure down to 0.0001 amu (where 1 amu = the mass of a proton). I think the potential here is not for the resolution but the ability of the nanotube scale to measure the mass using a sample of only a few molecules, where a mass spec experiment will need to have a lot more than that injected into the detector.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine