text: Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| For a growing number of medical startups, the holy grail is to develop technology that can diagnose hundreds of diseases with a single drop of blood. 
   
   Many people are squeamish about getting their blood drawn by traditional methods, such as inserting a long needle into a vein. And in developing countries, health clinics are eager for "lab on a chip" diagnostics that can be done without piercing a vein. 
   
   But researchers are finding myriad challenges with relying on a single blood drop. In a recent experiment, scientists at Rice 360° Institute for Global Health took seven drops of blood from 10 individuals. They tested each blood drop for basic health measures, such as hemoglobin and platelet counts, and found a wide range of results between drops that came from the same person. 
   
   "These data suggest caution when using measurements from a single drop of fingerprick blood," researchers Meaghan M. Bond and Rebecca R. Richards-Kortum concluded in The American Journal of Clinical Pathology. 
   
   Bond and Richards-Kortum told the New York Times that in order to achieve results as accurate as conventional methods—the venous blood draw—they had to average six to nine drops of blood from each individual. 
   
   In recent months, Theranos, a company that hoped to revolutionize the blood-testing industry, has come under fire from federal regulators. Theranos's CEO Elizabeth Holmes once promised to detect dozens of medical conditions, from high cholesterol to cancer, based on a few drops of blood. 
   
   San Diego-based Genalyte is also working on a diagnostics system to produce test results from a single blood drop. But unlike Theranos, Genalyte has generated a number of peer-reviewed studies to validate its approach. The company is focusing initially on autoimmune diseases, such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
target: – As doctors shift away from drawing vials of blood from patients and rely on lab-on-a-chip diagnostics that identify a myriad of conditions using a single drop of blood, there's now concern that not all of your blood is equal. A new study in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology suggests "caution when using measurements from a single drop of fingerprick blood," write researchers at Rice 360° Institute for Global Health: Our blood can change rather dramatically from one drop to the next. Researchers tested seven drops of blood from each of 10 participants and analyzed them for basic health metrics such as platelet counts and hemoglobin, and found a pretty wide range of results—so much so that they had to average the results from six to nine drops to rival the accuracy of a larger blood draw from a vein, reports the New York Times. "If you’re going to take a fingerprick stick to get your measures, you need to be aware that you’re sacrificing some accuracy," one of the researchers warns. The results have implications for startups like Theranos and Genalyte, which hope to diagnose diseases using only one drop. Unlike Theranos, however, Genalyte has produced results via peer-reviewed studies on tests to find autoimmune diseases such as lupus, reports Fast Company. (The Theranos founder dropped out of college at 19 to start the company.)