Yes, the title conjures up images of a futuristic world in which diabetics puff their way back to health. "New! Insulin Cigarettes!" In fact, it's rather more innocuous than that: scientists have engineered a type of insulin-containing tobacco plant that could - in theory, at least - be used as a diabetes treatment.

A study has just been completed of its use. Once freeze-dried and broken down into powder, the insulin-containing tobacco leaves were administered to mice. The scientists who came up with the plant (and who are based at the University of Central Florida), found the powder successfully prevented diabetes symptoms in the mice after eight weeks. It seems pretty safe to assume, they speculate, that humans with type 1 diabetes could get similar results from ingesting plant-based insulin.

The only snag so far is the image problem associated with tobacco. As a result, lead researcher Henry Daniell, is proposing a switch to lettuce, which is cheap, easy to grow and - oh, yeah! - is not associated with cancer. Good move.

The results of this study appear in the Plant Biotechnology Journal (July 2007).

A professor from the University of Central Florida is working on a way to test blood sugar using teardrops. Florencio Hernandez, a professor of chemistry and optics, hopes the technique could eventually be used as a painless way to test blood sugar levels, allowing diabetics to forego the much detested finger prick tests.

"It's so simple, it's wonderful," says Hernandez. Spoken like a true academic. You "simply" place a teardrop in a gold-salt solution, which generates gold nanoparticles. The solution then goes into a UV-Vis spectrophometer that reads the concentration of gold nanoparticles. Apparently, the concentration of gold nanoparticles is proportional to the concentration of glucose in the blood, so blood sugar levels can be calculated with this data. Phew. Er, doesn't sound simple to me, but I guess it's a snap if you're a whiz at chemistry and optics... Of course, Hernandez envisions some sort of easy-to-use gadget for testing if the technology makes it onto the market one day.

This is all well and good, but my question is: how do you get a teardrop? And how big of a drop do you need? I think I'd prefer a quick finger prick than to mess around with my eyes.