Drugs

It seems the Enhanced Games are on like Donkey Kong, with multi-million dollar investments from Peter Thiel and other high-profile VCs. Performance-enhancing drugs are welcome – indeed, this could become an early preview of a transhuman Olympics.

In order to smuggle illegal drugs into prisons, people are now soaking materials like paper and fabric in such drugs, letting the materials dry, then passing them along to inmates. A new portable device, however, sees through that ruse.

California startup Varda has celebrated the deployment of its first satellite, a test run of a fascinating space-based pharmaceuticals factory that moonlights as a hypersonic test rig during its Mach 25 re-entry to keep costs down.

In the future, tiny robots of all kinds of shapes could be swimming and crawling through your body, delivering drugs or patching up wounds. The next robot to join those ranks is a caterpillar-inspired device, which gets around with ease on hundreds of tiny, pointy legs.

​In police work, it's important to be able to prove that what you suspect is a narcotic really IS a narcotic. It is with this in mind that Spectral Engines is creating a portable drug-screening device. It's described as "the first re-usable pocket-sized scanner for police patrols."

The ONUSblue alcohol detection patch tells you when you've reached the legal threshold and has the potential to save millions of lives. The company's product roadmap is even more interesting with the detection of marijuana, methamphetime and a range of illegal recreational substances to follow.

Ford has created a suit of clothing that mimics the effects of driving while under the influence of drugs. The goal is to use the suit, along with its Drunk Driving Suit sibling, to educate kids in a hands-on way about the effects of driving under the influence.

The world's largest esports organization ESL, which hosts a US$250,000 Counter-Strike tournament in Germany next month, is partnering with anti-doping authorities to clamp down on gamers resorting to performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) to gain an edge.

To cut time and costs involved in developing new drugs, scientists have built Eve, an artificially-intelligent "robot scientist" that is not only faster and cheaper than its human counterparts, but has already identified a compound that could be used to fight malaria.

Administering dosages of drugs to fight cancerous tumors can be a difficult balancing act. But a new technique may afford doctors an unprecedented level of accuracy, using 3D printed replicas of a patient’s organs and tumors to better determine the amount of radiation delivered.

A great strength of 3D-printing in the field of medicine is the ability to provide low-cost implants molded to a patient's anatomy. Researchers have taken this technology one step further, loading these implants with medical compounds as a means of better targeted drug delivery.

The UK has put in place some of the strictest drug driving laws on the planet in an effort to get drug-impaired drivers off the roads. We contacted several drug testing experts and a forensic pharmacologist to try to work out what the "zero tolerance" levels set for these tests mean.