(credit: Tomaž Štolfa)

While figuring out whether the leftovers in your fridge have gone bad or not, the sniff-test just doesn’t cut it. But unfortunately, there are virtually no consumer-based tests to assure you that your food hasn’t turned, which is a huge public health problem. Each year, around 50 million Americans get food poisoning, and around 3,000 die.

Now, a research group in South Korea has come up with a possible solution, which can be briefly summarized with: pew, pew, nom, nom.

That’s right, researchers at the Korea Advanced Institutes of Science and Technology have developed a fridge-mountable laser that detects the squirming movements of microbes on the surface of your chow. The method is cheap, easy to use, and requires no contact with the contaminated food, making it an ideal solution to a common health problem, the authors suggest.