Some ‘Star Trek’ gadgets have become a reality

San Francisco Chronicle

Warp factor 3, Mr. Sulu? No can do.

Engage cloaking device? We’re working on it.

Communicators? Definitely.

Forty years after the original “Star Trek” series was canceled, warp drives and transporter beams remain more science fiction than fact.

But some of “Star Trek’s” 23rd-century gadgets, such as hand-held medical scanners, language translators and high-tech weaponry, are becoming a reality in the 21st century.

For one thing, almost every moviegoer attending the latest “Star Trek” film that opened in theaters recently must remember to turn off their communicators — better known as cell phones.

“Now with my iPhone, you can find out where you are using GPS, which is similar to some of the things in a tricorder,” said Lawrence Krauss, author of “The Physics of Star Trek” and a theoretical physicist. “At some point, I may be able to take my temperature with the iPhone.”

Still, he said, don’t hold your breath waiting to see people board giant starships and travel to the Klingon home world. They’d die of old age or deadly cosmic rays before they arrived.

“Sending people into space is about the stupidest thing you can think of,” said Krauss, director of Arizona State University’s new Origins Initiative, which probes such questions as how the universe began.

The new “Star Trek” movie is the 11th feature film to follow the original TV series created by the late Gene Roddenberry.

The “Star Trek” franchise, which has also included five spin-off TV series, is a pop-culture icon of the era, influencing many of those now creating new technology in Silicon Valley and around the globe.

Some of “Star Trek’s” once-futuristic technology is, in some form, already in consumers’ hands, including the 4 billion mobile phones in use around the world.

And advances in medical technology have brought the world a step closer to Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, who waved a salt-shaker-sized probe and looked at readings on his medical tricorder to diagnose injuries to Enterprise crew members.

Today, researchers are working on a variety of hand-held, noninvasive medical probes. One is a needle-less blood-testing device, dubbed the Venus prototype, being developed by a research team headed by Babs Soller, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Massachusetts.

The prototype, announced last month, goes further than a pulse oximeter, a commonly used device worn over the fingertip that measures oxygen saturation in the blood, Soller said.

The Venus sensor uses near-infrared light to penetrate layers of skin, fat and muscle to measure various parameters, such as the chemical balances and oxygen consumption rate in blood and tissue. The Venus system would bypass the pain and potential complications caused by drawing blood samples with a needle.

The research team has received funding from the National Space Biomedical Research Institute and the U.S. Army to develop the technology for use in space and on battlefields, but the possibilities are more widespread.