DOCTORS could soon be able to tell young women whether they are at risk of osteoporosis in old age.
The amount of collagen in bones can indicate whether they are likely to develop osteoporosis, which makes them brittle. But the only way to measure this was to remove a piece of bone. So a team led by Edward Draper of Imperial College London adapted Raman spectroscopy, a technique in which photons are bounced off an object and change frequency by telltale amounts depending on which molecules they strike. Photons that bounce off the surface return first, and usually swamp any…
