Medical Tricorder Invented

http://hothardware.com/news/doctor-family-team-wins-qualcomm-competition-to-build-a-real-star-trek-tricorder

This competition to build a medical tricorder has been going on for quite some time now. Part of the idea was to build an electronic device that, eventually, would become dirt cheap and could be used by people in the third world with little or no access to doctors. India did something similar decades ago by figuring out how to make cheap satellite antennas, some of them made out of bamboo even, so that every remote village could at least call a doctor when they needed help. After half a century, Star Trek is still firing up people's imaginations and encouraging new inventions and there is also a prize that awaits whoever can invent the first scientific tricorder.

Along these same lines, NASA has already tested the first Star Trek "inertial drive" which, somehow, appears to violate Newton's third law of motion producing thrust in a vacuum chamber without radiating anything or spitting anything out the back. Its a vanishingly tiny amount of thrust, but they're working on it and already have plans to test one in space. Theoretically, with a nuclear engine it could fly to the moon in about 4 hours and to mars in about 3 weeks.

A Star Trek transporter and warp drive engine appear to be much harder to create, but certainly don't violate the laws of physics as we currently know them. Its already possible to convert molecules into energy and beam them from one side a room to the other, but going that far with current technology would require longer than the lifetime of the universe. Similarly, a warp drive is theoretically possible, but the most efficient design thus far would require a small moon's worth of antimatter.