Are Days of Painful Needles Over? - as part of the news series by GeoBeats.

If the thought of getting a flu shot evokes painful memories, there's good news for you.

Research and development teams at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a painless injection device that could replace hypodermic needles. The device delivers a blast of medicine through a miniscule area of the skin in under a millisecond at almost the speed of sound. The jet-injection device can also extract blood from patients using the same painless method. A version of this new device will also have the ability to inject powdered substances. Ian Hunter, the lead scientist in this project says “a vaccine that can be administered in powder form requires no cooling,” so vaccines that are being imported will not be spoiled when the cooling system fails. This new technology could potentially save many lives.

People have been experimenting with injections since the 17th century, but the first syringe wasn’t developed until 1853 when a French surgeon invented a calibrated syringe which allowed the administrator to measure how much of a substance was being injected or extracted.