Latest news with #ElizabethHolmes
CNN
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
TikTok's scam sleuth wants to show you how companies are cheating — in a fun way
We live in the golden age of grift. Most of us can't go a day without at least one scammy text about an unpaid toll or a call from an unknown number with a shockingly human-like AI voice on the other side. The scale of the scam onslaught feels like it's part of some Faustian bargain we all entered into: In exchange for the miracle of, like, access to all the world's knowledge and people in our pockets, all the world's knowledge and people similarly have access to us, including the hustlers and the con artists. But way more hustlers, con artists and grifters than any other generation of human beings on Earth has ever had to comprehend before, let alone fend off. Thankfully, all the scam spam doesn't seem to have killed anyone's appetite for the grift as a genre. Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos con? I'll take a book, a podcast, a documentary and at least one serialized streaming project, please. Lifting the veil on a doomsday cult? I'm in, every day, and twice on Sundays. Never forget: We once had two dueling Fyre Festival documentaries on Hulu and Netflix. OK, maybe I'm just a mark for tales of clever cons, exposed. This newsletter is, in part, an outlet for my own fascination with the business hype cycle, which tends to, you know, exaggerate the truth. Or straight-up lie. But (thanks again to the miracle of the internet), I know that I'm not alone. Alex Falcone, an LA-based comedian, is a fellow con connoisseur (a con-noisseur?). Through his TikTok channel, Falcone excels at the art of the two-minute explainer, tackling frauds big (AI) and small (white chocolate). Falcone says he isn't a journalist, but he approaches his work with a similar hunger to peek behind the facade of a thing and expose it. Of his early foray into 'unfun facts,' Falcone says, he wanted to find the intersection of 'a little bit of a wet blanket, but you're OK afterwards… I don't like ruining people's day.' He's hit a nerve on TikTok, where he has more than half a million followers and a popular recurring series called 'Is it a scam? Yep.' (The delivery here is crucial: 'Is-it-a-scamyep!') The schtick is fast-talking facts and plenty of jokes about the companies and people and concepts that are, in one way or another, selling a bill of goods. I caught up with Falcone recently over Zoom to discuss the businesses of grift, comedy and journalism. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Nightcap: Can you tell me how you got on the scam beat? Alex Falcone: I've always liked the scheme-y underbelly. My grandfather worked in a few different contexts in carnivals, but the bulk of his life he was a pitchman, setting up a table by the midway selling kitchen gadgets and magic tricks. My dad's first job was as a kid standing in the audience while his father demonstrated a magic trick then yelling, 'How did he do that? I'll take two!' I met a con man when I was 16, and he taught me how to do card-cheating and pool-sharking stuff… and, like, mostly didn't use it for evil. I just like knowing how it works. It's sort of like the glass elevator where you see the mechanism behind it. Like, how am I being manipulated? I was working on 'unfun facts,' which is like the opposite of a party trick. My party-ruiner is telling people something that's going to bum them out that they didn't know. And that, it turns out, had a lot of overlap with my interest in things that were slightly crime-y. Nightcap: Why do you think people on TikTok have been so receptive to the scam series? Falcone: I think everybody is vaguely aware that they're walking around in a haunted carnival all the time — that everybody is trying to take advantage of them. If you're at a midway, then you know the basketball hoop is harder than other basketball hoops. Otherwise they wouldn't give you stuffed animals for making one free throw. Why is that? It's because it's 11 feet, and it's not perfectly round… and you know that it's wrong, but then it's still fun to be like, 'Oh, that's how you were getting me.' Nightcap: Do you find yourself, or your audience, experiencing scam fatigue? Falcone: So this is the trick. By slightly redefining what 'scam' means, it allows me to keep finding new ways to talk about things instead of just being bummed out. Whenever I'm tired of talking about AI or crypto, I can do an episode on white chocolate. Nightcap: Ugh, such a scam! Falcone: It's disgusting! It was originally invented as a medical coating for pills. And then they were like, 'we can sell this because we have all this extra cocoa butter lying around, and we can mix it with palm oil, which we've cut down the rainforest to make, and now we have too much of it.' Every step of that is terrifying, but also it tastes like cat vomit. So that's inherently funny. That's my palate cleanser. I have an escape valve for a lot of this. Actually, if you hadn't asked that, I would have asked you the same question… How do you avoid getting bummed out by this? Are all of your colleagues just sort of zombie-brained now? Nightcap: There's a bit of zombie-brain going around. I will say I spend a good amount of time — like a shameful amount of time — disassociating on TikTok. Falcone: I think that's great… There are a lot of problems with the way algorithms work, but one of the things that's great is you can just create an account with a new name, a fresh algorithm, and decide this algorithm is just for escapism. I did a video about algorithms a while ago, and so as a demonstration I decided to make an account for videos about bunnies. In TikTok, it took me 15 minutes before the algorithm was just rabbits and nothing else… So that is one of the ways that I've kept myself sane — having multiple algorithms that I play with depending on my mood. Having a rabbit account as a side project is really fun. Nightcap: You've covered AI hype and marketing a few times… Falcone: It feels like there's an emperor-has-no clothes situation — that we're all just waiting for somebody to be like, Oh, wait, it's bad! Oh… we thought so, and then you told us we were dumb for thinking that it's not working, but it is actually bad. Nightcap: How do you source your scam material? Falcone: I have what I think of as the mainline scam, where the answer is 'yep,' and I just have a backlog of those. Occasionally, stuff from friends pops up. Somebody mentioned to me the other day that the Oscars were originally started to prevent actors from unionizing, which I assumed couldn't possibly be true. But it turns out, [Louis B. Mayer] of MGM was the founder of the academy, and that was what he said he was doing. (Editor's note: This checks out.) The user submissions have a separate path, because the answer to 'Is it a scam?' can sometimes be 'no.' Nightcap: I was so nervous when I came across one of your videos about Costco. Please don't ruin Costco! Falcone: Costco was a great 'nope.' The thing about Costco, and this is true of a lot of these things, is it's not a scam, but it's definitely a scheme. You have to pay to shop, which is such a crazy business model. You pay to walk in the door of a store where everything still costs money. That's definitely a scheme. But I don't think it's a scam. Now I have 100-150 messages every day on the different platforms, asking 'can you look into this thing for me' … But the main source is just things that I'm generally mad about in my own life. I have plenty of those to keep this going for another couple years.
CNN
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
TikTok's scam sleuth wants to show you how companies are cheating — in a fun way
We live in the golden age of grift. Most of us can't go a day without at least one scammy text about an unpaid toll or a call from an unknown number with a shockingly human-like AI voice on the other side. The scale of the scam onslaught feels like it's part of some Faustian bargain we all entered into: In exchange for the miracle of, like, access to all the world's knowledge and people in our pockets, all the world's knowledge and people similarly have access to us, including the hustlers and the con artists. But way more hustlers, con artists and grifters than any other generation of human beings on Earth has ever had to comprehend before, let alone fend off. Thankfully, all the scam spam doesn't seem to have killed anyone's appetite for the grift as a genre. Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos con? I'll take a book, a podcast, a documentary and at least one serialized streaming project, please. Lifting the veil on a doomsday cult? I'm in, every day, and twice on Sundays. Never forget: We once had two dueling Fyre Festival documentaries on Hulu and Netflix. OK, maybe I'm just a mark for tales of clever cons, exposed. This newsletter is, in part, an outlet for my own fascination with the business hype cycle, which tends to, you know, exaggerate the truth. Or straight-up lie. But (thanks again to the miracle of the internet), I know that I'm not alone. Alex Falcone, an LA-based comedian, is a fellow con connoisseur (a con-noisseur?). Through his TikTok channel, Falcone excels at the art of the two-minute explainer, tackling frauds big (AI) and small (white chocolate). Falcone says he isn't a journalist, but he approaches his work with a similar hunger to peek behind the facade of a thing and expose it. Of his early foray into 'unfun facts,' Falcone says, he wanted to find the intersection of 'a little bit of a wet blanket, but you're OK afterwards… I don't like ruining people's day.' He's hit a nerve on TikTok, where he has more than half a million followers and a popular recurring series called 'Is it a scam? Yep.' (The delivery here is crucial: 'Is-it-a-scamyep!') The schtick is fast-talking facts and plenty of jokes about the companies and people and concepts that are, in one way or another, selling a bill of goods. I caught up with Falcone recently over Zoom to discuss the businesses of grift, comedy and journalism. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Nightcap: Can you tell me how you got on the scam beat? Alex Falcone: I've always liked the scheme-y underbelly. My grandfather worked in a few different contexts in carnivals, but the bulk of his life he was a pitchman, setting up a table by the midway selling kitchen gadgets and magic tricks. My dad's first job was as a kid standing in the audience while his father demonstrated a magic trick then yelling, 'How did he do that? I'll take two!' I met a con man when I was 16, and he taught me how to do card-cheating and pool-sharking stuff… and, like, mostly didn't use it for evil. I just like knowing how it works. It's sort of like the glass elevator where you see the mechanism behind it. Like, how am I being manipulated? I was working on 'unfun facts,' which is like the opposite of a party trick. My party-ruiner is telling people something that's going to bum them out that they didn't know. And that, it turns out, had a lot of overlap with my interest in things that were slightly crime-y. Nightcap: Why do you think people on TikTok have been so receptive to the scam series? Falcone: I think everybody is vaguely aware that they're walking around in a haunted carnival all the time — that everybody is trying to take advantage of them. If you're at a midway, then you know the basketball hoop is harder than other basketball hoops. Otherwise they wouldn't give you stuffed animals for making one free throw. Why is that? It's because it's 11 feet, and it's not perfectly round… and you know that it's wrong, but then it's still fun to be like, 'Oh, that's how you were getting me.' Nightcap: Do you find yourself, or your audience, experiencing scam fatigue? Falcone: So this is the trick. By slightly redefining what 'scam' means, it allows me to keep finding new ways to talk about things instead of just being bummed out. Whenever I'm tired of talking about AI or crypto, I can do an episode on white chocolate. Nightcap: Ugh, such a scam! Falcone: It's disgusting! It was originally invented as a medical coating for pills. And then they were like, 'we can sell this because we have all this extra cocoa butter lying around, and we can mix it with palm oil, which we've cut down the rainforest to make, and now we have too much of it.' Every step of that is terrifying, but also it tastes like cat vomit. So that's inherently funny. That's my palate cleanser. I have an escape valve for a lot of this. Actually, if you hadn't asked that, I would have asked you the same question… How do you avoid getting bummed out by this? Are all of your colleagues just sort of zombie-brained now? Nightcap: There's a bit of zombie-brain going around. I will say I spend a good amount of time — like a shameful amount of time — disassociating on TikTok. Falcone: I think that's great… There are a lot of problems with the way algorithms work, but one of the things that's great is you can just create an account with a new name, a fresh algorithm, and decide this algorithm is just for escapism. I did a video about algorithms a while ago, and so as a demonstration I decided to make an account for videos about bunnies. In TikTok, it took me 15 minutes before the algorithm was just rabbits and nothing else… So that is one of the ways that I've kept myself sane — having multiple algorithms that I play with depending on my mood. Having a rabbit account as a side project is really fun. Nightcap: You've covered AI hype and marketing a few times… Falcone: It feels like there's an emperor-has-no clothes situation — that we're all just waiting for somebody to be like, Oh, wait, it's bad! Oh… we thought so, and then you told us we were dumb for thinking that it's not working, but it is actually bad. Nightcap: How do you source your scam material? Falcone: I have what I think of as the mainline scam, where the answer is 'yep,' and I just have a backlog of those. Occasionally, stuff from friends pops up. Somebody mentioned to me the other day that the Oscars were originally started to prevent actors from unionizing, which I assumed couldn't possibly be true. But it turns out, [Louis B. Mayer] of MGM was the founder of the academy, and that was what he said he was doing. (Editor's note: This checks out.) The user submissions have a separate path, because the answer to 'Is it a scam?' can sometimes be 'no.' Nightcap: I was so nervous when I came across one of your videos about Costco. Please don't ruin Costco! Falcone: Costco was a great 'nope.' The thing about Costco, and this is true of a lot of these things, is it's not a scam, but it's definitely a scheme. You have to pay to shop, which is such a crazy business model. You pay to walk in the door of a store where everything still costs money. That's definitely a scheme. But I don't think it's a scam. Now I have 100-150 messages every day on the different platforms, asking 'can you look into this thing for me' … But the main source is just things that I'm generally mad about in my own life. I have plenty of those to keep this going for another couple years.
CNN
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
TikTok's scam sleuth wants to show you how companies are cheating — in a fun way
We live in the golden age of grift. Most of us can't go a day without at least one scammy text about an unpaid toll or a call from an unknown number with a shockingly human-like AI voice on the other side. The scale of the scam onslaught feels like it's part of some Faustian bargain we all entered into: In exchange for the miracle of, like, access to all the world's knowledge and people in our pockets, all the world's knowledge and people similarly have access to us, including the hustlers and the con artists. But way more hustlers, con artists and grifters than any other generation of human beings on Earth has ever had to comprehend before, let alone fend off. Thankfully, all the scam spam doesn't seem to have killed anyone's appetite for the grift as a genre. Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos con? I'll take a book, a podcast, a documentary and at least one serialized streaming project, please. Lifting the veil on a doomsday cult? I'm in, every day, and twice on Sundays. Never forget: We once had two dueling Fyre Festival documentaries on Hulu and Netflix. OK, maybe I'm just a mark for tales of clever cons, exposed. This newsletter is, in part, an outlet for my own fascination with the business hype cycle, which tends to, you know, exaggerate the truth. Or straight-up lie. But (thanks again to the miracle of the internet), I know that I'm not alone. Alex Falcone, an LA-based comedian, is a fellow con connoisseur (a con-noisseur?). Through his TikTok channel, Falcone excels at the art of the two-minute explainer, tackling frauds big (AI) and small (white chocolate). Falcone says he isn't a journalist, but he approaches his work with a similar hunger to peek behind the facade of a thing and expose it. Of his early foray into 'unfun facts,' Falcone says, he wanted to find the intersection of 'a little bit of a wet blanket, but you're OK afterwards… I don't like ruining people's day.' He's hit a nerve on TikTok, where he has more than half a million followers and a popular recurring series called 'Is it a scam? Yep.' (The delivery here is crucial: 'Is-it-a-scamyep!') The schtick is fast-talking facts and plenty of jokes about the companies and people and concepts that are, in one way or another, selling a bill of goods. I caught up with Falcone recently over Zoom to discuss the businesses of grift, comedy and journalism. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Nightcap: Can you tell me how you got on the scam beat? Alex Falcone: I've always liked the scheme-y underbelly. My grandfather worked in a few different contexts in carnivals, but the bulk of his life he was a pitchman, setting up a table by the midway selling kitchen gadgets and magic tricks. My dad's first job was as a kid standing in the audience while his father demonstrated a magic trick then yelling, 'How did he do that? I'll take two!' I met a con man when I was 16, and he taught me how to do card-cheating and pool-sharking stuff… and, like, mostly didn't use it for evil. I just like knowing how it works. It's sort of like the glass elevator where you see the mechanism behind it. Like, how am I being manipulated? I was working on 'unfun facts,' which is like the opposite of a party trick. My party-ruiner is telling people something that's going to bum them out that they didn't know. And that, it turns out, had a lot of overlap with my interest in things that were slightly crime-y. Nightcap: Why do you think people on TikTok have been so receptive to the scam series? Falcone: I think everybody is vaguely aware that they're walking around in a haunted carnival all the time — that everybody is trying to take advantage of them. If you're at a midway, then you know the basketball hoop is harder than other basketball hoops. Otherwise they wouldn't give you stuffed animals for making one free throw. Why is that? It's because it's 11 feet, and it's not perfectly round… and you know that it's wrong, but then it's still fun to be like, 'Oh, that's how you were getting me.' Nightcap: Do you find yourself, or your audience, experiencing scam fatigue? Falcone: So this is the trick. By slightly redefining what 'scam' means, it allows me to keep finding new ways to talk about things instead of just being bummed out. Whenever I'm tired of talking about AI or crypto, I can do an episode on white chocolate. Nightcap: Ugh, such a scam! Falcone: It's disgusting! It was originally invented as a medical coating for pills. And then they were like, 'we can sell this because we have all this extra cocoa butter lying around, and we can mix it with palm oil, which we've cut down the rainforest to make, and now we have too much of it.' Every step of that is terrifying, but also it tastes like cat vomit. So that's inherently funny. That's my palate cleanser. I have an escape valve for a lot of this. Actually, if you hadn't asked that, I would have asked you the same question… How do you avoid getting bummed out by this? Are all of your colleagues just sort of zombie-brained now? Nightcap: There's a bit of zombie-brain going around. I will say I spend a good amount of time — like a shameful amount of time — disassociating on TikTok. Falcone: I think that's great… There are a lot of problems with the way algorithms work, but one of the things that's great is you can just create an account with a new name, a fresh algorithm, and decide this algorithm is just for escapism. I did a video about algorithms a while ago, and so as a demonstration I decided to make an account for videos about bunnies. In TikTok, it took me 15 minutes before the algorithm was just rabbits and nothing else… So that is one of the ways that I've kept myself sane — having multiple algorithms that I play with depending on my mood. Having a rabbit account as a side project is really fun. Nightcap: You've covered AI hype and marketing a few times… Falcone: It feels like there's an emperor-has-no clothes situation — that we're all just waiting for somebody to be like, Oh, wait, it's bad! Oh… we thought so, and then you told us we were dumb for thinking that it's not working, but it is actually bad. Nightcap: How do you source your scam material? Falcone: I have what I think of as the mainline scam, where the answer is 'yep,' and I just have a backlog of those. Occasionally, stuff from friends pops up. Somebody mentioned to me the other day that the Oscars were originally started to prevent actors from unionizing, which I assumed couldn't possibly be true. But it turns out, [Louis B. Mayer] of MGM was the founder of the academy, and that was what he said he was doing. (Editor's note: This checks out.) The user submissions have a separate path, because the answer to 'Is it a scam?' can sometimes be 'no.' Nightcap: I was so nervous when I came across one of your videos about Costco. Please don't ruin Costco! Falcone: Costco was a great 'nope.' The thing about Costco, and this is true of a lot of these things, is it's not a scam, but it's definitely a scheme. You have to pay to shop, which is such a crazy business model. You pay to walk in the door of a store where everything still costs money. That's definitely a scheme. But I don't think it's a scam. Now I have 100-150 messages every day on the different platforms, asking 'can you look into this thing for me' … But the main source is just things that I'm generally mad about in my own life. I have plenty of those to keep this going for another couple years.
WIRED
20-05-2025
- Business
- WIRED
What to Expect When You're Convicted
May 20, 2025 6:00 AM When a formerly incarcerated 'troubleshooter for the mafia' looked for a second career, he chose the thing he knew best. He became a prison consultant for white-collar criminals. PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: JOHANNA GOODMAN; GETTY IMAGES From Sam Bankman-Fried's fraud-ridden crypto empire to Elizabeth Holmes' sham biotech company to deepfakers on the internet bilking grandmas of their retirement savings, white-collar crime seems to touch every last corner of tech. For the business titan who may one day end up in custody and can't count on a presidential pardon, it never hurts to know a guy. WIRED spoke with a self-described former 'troubleshooter for the mafia' who was incarcerated in US penitentiaries for a decade and found a new role for himself on the outside: He became a prison consultant. Now he works with an array of white-collar offenders. He berates and curses the ears off his clients—but it's all part of the no-bullshit approach he says he uses to help them reduce and optimize their time inside. Once when I was in prison and we were walking out of the dining hall, I stopped and I looked out the window. I said, 'Do you see it?' And the other inmates are like, 'What?' I go, 'It's right there.' And they're stopping and gazing into the sky. Then more people come out of the dining hall and start looking too, and before you know it, so do the correctional officers. Finally, I said: 'Gee, see how easy it is to take control of stupid people?' I had a prison psychiatrist say that I treated the prison system like it was my own personal amusement park. I was just having too good of a time in there. I would get on the telephone, calling home or whoever, and I'd go, 'Well, if the staff hates me right now, they're going to despise me by this weekend. I have something special planned. I really can't say. The staff's listening in on the phone calls.' So the weekend rolls around, they put extra staff members on duty, wondering, 'All right, what's the dude going to do?' I'm lying in my fucking bunk reading a book. I ain't going to do shit. But I fucking manipulated these people. I also spent my time helping people. I would help people who were over-sentenced on their charges get into RDAP, the Residential Drug Abuse Program, or an extra halfway house called the Second Chance Act program. I would go through their legal paperwork and say, 'You know what? Let's file in court on this,' and boom, all of a sudden somebody gets resentenced. That made me a folk hero. I thought, 'Well shit, I could turn this into a business.' When I first got out of custody, there was nobody doing this. My primary clients were people that had financial fraud. Some drug clients, but it was people who ripped people off. Your white-collar offenders. It's people who are scared, angry, and confused. If they reach out to me before they've gone in, I can get them prepared. Between people on the outside and people on the inside, I may have like 50 clients, maybe 100, at a time. Sometimes my services are free, sometimes they're $3,500, $5,000, $10,000. I even had one guy pay me $50,000. It just depends on the person, their circumstance, what they can afford. I've got four other people who work with me, two women and two men. When my clients come to me, I tell them: 'OK, so shut the fuck up and listen to what I have to say. You're in deep shit. I'm going to pull your head out of your ass, because your lawyer probably screwed you, made you false fucking promises that they can't keep. First let's take a look at your charges, your federal indictment. What are you charged with? Is it drugs? Is it some type of wire fraud?' And we'll just break your case down. I'm not a lawyer. I can't give you legal advice. But what I can do is explain the law to you, and I can help you determine whether or not you should go to trial or take a plea agreement. I also teach my clients how to lie on the witness stand effectively, how to beat the polygraph machine. So I'm a full-service kind of business. I got hit with narcotics trafficking, securities fraud, racketeering, obstruction of justice, and possession of machine guns. I'm not here to fucking judge anybody. I know within five minutes of seeing the indictment whether this person's going to prison. There's no question about it, unless they're ratting people out. So a dumbass gets sentenced. I have a chemical dependency assessment done on them to determine whether they have a substance abuse issue. If I have a report generated for them and it gets put into their probation report at sentencing and they submit it to the prison, it creates eligibility for them to get into a program to get out up to one year early. I explain to them it's not what they've seen on TV. I hold their hand and their family's hand, because their families are busy watching prison shows and they're all freaked out. I calm them down. Prison is boring. It's Groundhog Day. Every day is the last day, unless people get into a fight or something. I explain to them the different types of prisons. A majority of my clients go to minimum security institutions, known as federal prison camps. Many have no fences, no walls. They often don't lock the doors. I'm teaching my clients the politics of prison life—how to deal with staff, how to deal with other inmates. You don't want to hang out with informants or child molesters. And some of the staff members are fucking cuckoo. They're unprofessional. They're not well trained. They have their own emotional and personal issues. I give people that psychological peace of mind. I have a lot of clients that are family members of people in custody. I'm like a cross between a marriage counselor, a psychologist, a life coach, and a priest. So that calms the people. My wife said that I need to be nicer to the clients. I think maybe I'm desensitized because I've been doing this shit for so long. I get frustrated. I sometimes go off on people. I say, 'I don't know who's dumber, you or a fucking lawyer, listen the fuck up.' I mean, my ex-wife said I didn't have one ounce of human kindness. She knew me the best. —As told to Elana Klein
Hans India
20-05-2025
- Health
- Hans India
A few drops of blood, saliva or urine can help detect illnesses
In the 2000s, biotech company Theranos promised to revolutionise blood testing. Founder Elizabeth Holmes claimed Theranos technology could perform hundreds of tests using just a finger-prick drop of blood. If true, their diagnostics would be faster, cheaper and more accessible. Theranos raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors and was valued at more than $nine billion in 2015. However, the technology never worked, leading to one of the biggest scandals in biotech history. Theranos was secretly using traditional machines to run many tests, then claiming the results came from its own (non-functional) device. Holmes was eventually convicted of fraud and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Today, a new startup, Haemanthus, claims to have developed a similar technology. Co-founded by Billy Evans (Holmes' partner), this new company says it can detect and diagnose illnesses using tiny amounts of blood, urine, or even saliva. While technology has advanced since Theranos' time, it's important to consider these claims carefully. Clinicians and lab techs can currently detect many conditions with blood, and some with urine or saliva. These are important tools in modern medicine. However, the volumes required are usually much greater than a few drops or a dab. What can blood detect? Blood circulates through all organs, transporting cells, nutrients, hormones and waste products. Blood tests collect several millilitres of blood from a vein and send this to a laboratory for analysis. Blood tests can check if a person has signs of infection or disease, to monitor organ function, or to show how a person is responding to medical treatment. Blood tests are widely used to monitor heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, or deficiencies in iron or vitamins. A significant proportion of medical decisions are based on laboratory analysis of blood tests. Making them more affordable and accessible would have great benefits. What about urine? Urine is produced by the kidneys and contains waste filtered from the blood. The colour and composition of urine gives you a snapshot of any problems the body might be trying to fix. Urine analysis can detect urinary tract infections, kidney disorders, diabetes and liver diseases by measuring sugars, proteins and cells. As urine tests are non-invasive and easy to administer, they can be used to quickly screen for some conditions. However, factors such as how much you've had to drink and what you've eaten can influence urine composition, potentially affecting test results. Saliva can also be used for diagnoses Saliva is the clear, watery liquid produced by salivary glands in the mouth. It's mostly water (around 99 per cent), but also contains various substances such as hormones, antibodies, enzymes, DNA, RNA and metabolites. Saliva testing is already used in clinical settings to detect HIV antibodies, monitor levels of cortisol (a marker of stress) and to diagnose viral infections such as Covid-19. The potential of saliva as another non-invasive diagnostic tool is growing, especially as researchers identify more markers of disease that it can contain. However, saliva production varies between individuals. The composition of saliva can be impacted by what you eat and drink, the time of day, or even stress. These variations can limit how consistent and reliable saliva can be for making a diagnosis. But how much of it do you need? While diagnosing diseases using bodily fluids isn't new, Haemanthus and other startups differentiate themselves by aiming (and claiming) to need only small amounts for multiple tests: a drop of blood, a swab of saliva, or a few milliliters of urine. This would mean faster, cheaper, more convenient tests that cause less discomfort. But there are physical limitations of small samples. Many diagnostic markers (called biomarkers) are only present in very low amounts in our body fluids. When the sample amount decreases, so will biomarkers, thereby making it difficult to detect them reliably. This is particularly true for biomarkers such as hormones, cancer markers, or early-stage disease indicators. What can you detect with a few drops? Of course, some conditions can be diagnosed using small samples, but generally only one condition is tested for with each small sample, unlike the claims of companies like Theranos. Finger-prick blood samples, for example, can monitor blood glucose levels of people with diabetes. Small urine samples can detect urinary tract infections, but not all types of infections at once. The specific biomarkers for these conditions can be reliably detectable in small amounts of fluid. To diagnose more complex conditions, or even unknown conditions, multiple tests may be required, each needing different sample preparations. This requires both volume and precision – two things tests with small sample volumes struggle to deliver. What happens next? While the idea of diagnosing illnesses with small fluid samples is promising, especially for remote or resource-limited settings, the science suggests we should be cautious. Most human diseases are complicated, and we usually need comprehensive testing approaches to diagnose them. Relying only on small fluid samples could lead to misdiagnosis, delayed treatments, or unnecessary interventions. Innovations in biosensor technology, machine learning algorithms and biomarker discovery continue to advance the field. And one day, fast and reliable small volume testing may be possible. However, a lot more peer-reviewed research and regulatory approvals will be essential to ensure patient safety and diagnostic accuracy. (The writers are from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research)
