Today, diagnosing bird flu entails a four-day wait for laboratory results. That's an eternity for a germ that could spread across an entire country in that time if it were to become contagious between humans, says University of Colorado chemist Kathy Rowlen. That's why she and her colleagues have designed the "flu chip," a genetic detector the size of a microscope slide that identifies multiple flu strains in less than 11 hours.

A few months AGO, when researchers analyzed the genome of the devastating 1918 influenza, they found it to be a direct descendant of a common bird-flu strain, with just a few disparate amino acids here and there. The finding cast a chilling new light on the most lethal modern bird flu, known as H5N1, which has already killed at least 70 people in Asia but isn't transmissible between humans-yet.