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.