Slashdot Mirror
Explosives Detection Breakthrough Via Green Laser
retiarius writes "In keeping with celebrating the USA's
National Chemistry Week (aside from watching the hitcount
for Tom Lehrer's very chemical music video at
CD Baby), I'm duly impressed by an amazingly simple new way to
detect explosives at a distance -- just use a store-bought
presentation green laser pointer and some dimestore
infrared night vision glasses! The (alas, patentable)
details are in
this week's EE Times."
This is way cool. All though now everyone knows how it works...
Meddle thou not in the affairs of Dragons, for thou art crunchy and with most anything.
A quick read of this article suggests that this will have a false positive problem with meat products. The nitrite (NO2) groups found in explosives that glow IR when exposed to green light are also found in meat products. I'm surprised the researchers did not test this potential source of false postives because other explosives detection technologies that look for nitrogen are also fooled by meat products.
Eat a hot dog or deli sandwich before going through security and you may end up in the dreaded secondary screening line when the bomb detector mistakes bologna for a bomb.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Once debugged (meat), the mfr will probably be able to sell the devices to the govt. If they charge too much, the GSA (procurement) will go out for bids. Local and state bomb squads will have more trouble, but the Federal govt could just give them detectors under some fancy pgm.
ok, that means that to build a bomb you need laboratory equipment with gas control (think big glass box) and a tight seal allowing you access to the INSIDE of the bomb container.
:generous grease application for example) then flush air, introduce clean container cap, close container...
you then have to find a way to seal the container air-tight (low-tech
ok.. we just upped the ante and non-professionnal bomb makers won't be able to make the technological jump...=>more security
but it's nothing that someone with some organisation couldn't do...but we have to assume anyone with that sort of hardware is checked and easier to find out.
Alas, after going through this procedure (or any other they think of) they (terrorists-bomber-mad(wo)men now only have to get said night visions googles and green laser and test it themselves...
just another check in in the seemingly already complicated art of making bombs (I wouldn't know, as IANAB -I Am Not A Bomber - 8p )
I think they should have kept it a secret longer, even if they precised it was already one year old...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
So the physical fact that green lasers and NVGs can be used to detect explosives, of resideue, (or soap), is now a patentable process.
Never mind all that stuff about physical phenomena being unpatentable. Here at the USPTO we grant with prejudice to trifling things like gross obviousness, unoriginality and indeed patentablity itself.
Applicants for patents on Earth, Air, Fire and Water are now currently being considered.
P.S.
If anyone, including all you foreigners, doesn't like it, be prepared for our lawyers to WIPO you into povert^H^H^H^H^H^Hsubmission.
May the Maths Be with you!
They've been looking for a good remote land mine sensor. Maybe this is it!
This might explain much in the way of nighttime
targeting activity in this hellhole right about now...
Wanna bet that many weapons cache explosions
(under cover of hitting suspected insurgent hideouts)
are the result of shining those green lasers on
rooftops of the bombmakers? It makes more sense that
this can be accomplished auto-remotely than responding
to what woefully passes for "human intelligence"
on the ground.
I wonder how many lives could have been saved already if they hadn't kept this under wraps for a year...
include $sig;
1;
Can it see if a bag contains a bomb or some one's school books from outside? That would be useful. I have lost count of how many times I have been held up because someone left a bag somewhere and they had to call in the bomb squad to see if it is a bomb or someone's laundry/groceries/school books etc. This is not a place where you want false negatives!
Erlang Developer and podcaster
The (alas, patentable) details are in this week's EE Times.
By definition, if it has been published, it cannot be patentable.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the detection scheme described in the article (two infrared sensors, one with a 705-nm filter, and the other without a filter to eliminate false positives) be easy to fool by masking the explosive with another substance that also photoluminesces at 705-nm?
For example, suppose non-explosive substance foo photoluminesces at and around 705-nm, and is normally allowed past the detector because it lacks the special signature. If you were to put a bunch of foo in the same container as your explosive, thereby combining the infrared signatures (if that's actually what would happen), couldn't you fool the detector?
Of course, the article is light on real details, and I'm no chemistry expert, so maybe it's not that easy to fool.
They already have the night-vision goggles. Might only work for detection at night, but that's better than the current status quo...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
... with a match...
others figure out how to mask it or simply keep it in.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Just wondering. What is it about (food grade)meat that prevents humans from being a potential false-positive.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
What freakin' dimestore has night vision goggles?
I've always wondered about this... Whether it's dogs sniffing drugs or million dollar machines sniffing for explosives - Why don't the bad guys just contaminate the entire area so that you can't use the detector? I mean, wouldn't somebody walking around spilling some nitrate material all over the airport carpets just ruin that airport permanently?
If it's so sensitive that the bad guys can't cleanse themselves of it, how could one possibly clean an entire airport?
Pat
1) This is simple, non-contact method but it relies on a spectral signature general for nitramines and nitro-aromatics. Some chemicals used in parfumery (artificial musk scent) have nitro groups - so there will be false positives.
2) This method will not work for acetonperoxide (the super-unstable explosive prefered by Palestinian suicide bombers and the wannabe shoe-bomber Reid - because acetonperoxide does not contain any nitros) and for fertilizer bombs (no volatile nitroorganics there).
3)Also, this detection method can be fooled by masking the narrow fluorescence signature of nitro explosives by adding other chemicals with broad fluorescence to confuse the instrument into thinking "this is a false positive". All it takes for the bad guys to get hold of the detection device and experiment with some common household, drugstore or paintshop materials to find the right stuff to spray onto their luggage making it immune for this detection. It may well be that a laundry softener or moskyto repellent can threw this techique off.
4) The currently used swab-tests/mass spectrometry analysis at the airports recognize very characteristic ion mass (of the parent molecule and its fragments) - the signal pattern unique for each explosive, so this masspec method is harder to fool and less likely to give false positives.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
With his lab's high-resolution photoluminescent meter, one of his students performed a simple test that no major lab had thought to perform before It angers me that they didn't even bother to name the student who thought of it. Meanwhile the emeritus professor gets to bask in all the glory of keeping the homeland safe. This has a long history, and misappropriation has been ingrained into the academic culture. Offhand I can think readily of a couple of similar examples, such as the discovery of pulsars where the supervisor took all the credit for the student's innovation.
After actually RTFA, I'm impressed. This could make homicide bombers highly visible, 1/2 mile before they get to their target. I suppose it may also be possible to extend the technology's sensitivity to allow airborne spotting of weapons stashes and bomb-making facilities. Anyone holding a significant amount of C4 is going to be visible from a distance, and the larger the amount, the larger the distance. (Will an ammo dump be visible from orbit?)
If so, this technology could make a lot of terrorist methods difficult or even obsolete. It could also make a lot of survivalists in Idaho unhappy. Anyone with a significant amount of these N compounds (that ammo stash in your basement?) will have a cloud of particles around them.
For those who haven't RTFA, one of the key points is that many (all?) high-power explosives contain certain bonds between nitrogen and 2 oxygen, which are volatile, and constantly emit a cloud of particles that can be picked up with this system. So without (I suppose) some way of hermetically sealing (harder than it seems), then completely decontaminating the outside of the package, you can't really hide the stuff. (Of course, someone will figure out a way...) The system compares the signal from a very narrow 'alarm' band against a broader band to avoid false hits due to other non-explosive compounds. (I wonder if over time they'll need to make this more sophisticated, as the tech war expands in this area.)
The bomb-detection airport equipment presently in use at a few airports (IIRC using neutron-activation?) costs well over $1million per unit, and takes up about 10x12 feet (3x4m) of valuable airport lobby real estate. These two factors have prevented installation in all the airport security checkpoints - none of the gov, the airlines or the airports want to pay for them. It appears the cost of one of these units in a production version would be under $500, so a handheld system is many orders of magnitude better on both size and cost, not to mention portability - scan folks driving up, or getting out of their car. If this system is even reasonably good, a version could be in the hands of airport security folks within a year. No, wait, there's governments involved - three years? It's easy enough and very useful to add these as an additional tool, while testing.
Links on the present methods: CNN, 9/2004, USA Today, 2002.
I'll bet the Israelis have them in test within a couple of weeks, if not already. The US military could certainly begin testing them for use in Iraq and other places immediately, but I don't know if they're that quick on the uptake for new tech.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
My bomb explodes when exposed to 325 - 532 nm green laser wavelengths!
Aniseed has been used to throw off tracking dogs for hundreds of years. It's sometimes called dog pepper.