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New Sensor Technology Looks at Molecular 'Fingerprint'
New sensor technology developed by engineers at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory can now detect chemical, biological, nuclear, and explosive materials much more quickly and efficiently. From the article: "The millimeter/terahertz technology detects the energy levels of a molecule as it rotates. The frequency distribution of this energy provides a unique and reproducible spectral pattern - its 'fingerprint' - that identifies the material. The technology can also be used in its imaging modality - ranging from concealed weapons to medical applications such as tumor detection."
I wonder if this technology is similar to what (might) be being used here:
Mystery Robot
Yes, all well and good. But can it be used to detect Cylons?
This sounds like the sort of technology that is woefully expensive to implement. It's one thing to be functionally applicable for such uses, but it's completely different to be financially viable.
Would this technology ever actually make it to the security checks at an airport, for instance? Does it offer a clear financial benefit over existing solutions?
Um...rotational spectroscopy is not new at all. It's been around for a very long time - at least 50 years, probably longer.
o py
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotational_spectrosc
From TFA:
"We can use this technology to detect chemical and biological agents and also to determine if a country is using its nuclear reactors to produce material for nuclear weapons or to track the direction of a chemical or radioactive plume to evacuate an area," explained Paul Raptis, section manager. Raptis is developing these sensors with Argonne engineers Sami Gopalsami, Sasan Bakhtiari and Hual-Te Chien.
It seems as if this is good news, the ability to decide if they really are WMD's or just a new fuel source for some 3rd world country that he had no reason to invade. Perhaps this can be tested with the Iranian issues of today.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
But without any mobility of the device, this just wont work. Sure, it can detect if anything is amiss in a radius of 600 meters, but beyond that, it would be pretty expensive to implement in all major areas of the US.
Of course, I would feel pretty good seeing one at airports.
-gjr
Great! Another reason to fear our robotic overlords....they're trying to find our pot!
If only we had this technology when we first went to war with Iraq.
Oh wait...
I was under the impression that properly functioning nuclear power plants shouldn't be releasing any kind of radiation into the air while operating, let alone enough radiocative plumes detectable from 9 km away. Then again, it is a Russian nuclear power plant, and Russians seem to have a much more relaxed attitude about that kind of thing.
If that tech really works as simply as that, then we should immediately have laws to protect our privacy, while offering security. Like requiring the imaging be allowed only when the material detection shows an illegal, controlled substance - like anthrax or uranium. A strict list of controlled substances, with contingencies for substances with "dual use" (legal as well as illegal) should allow imaging of legal objects to stop the intrusions.
--
make install -not war
I can totally see this being used for cancer research. As in, no more mamograms or colonoscopies. sweet.
When you look into the display of this device does it cast a soft blue glow on your face?
I certainly don't want to walk through one of these sensor things and have alarms and lights go flashing: POT HEAD ALERT!! POT HEAD ALERT! ..then have the dogs sent on me because I have a trace amount of THC on my clothes.
When/if these things become ubiquitous, it's not going to be so funny. And it wont be limited to pot heads and bomb makers either.
So now they'll justify full body scans at the airport as merely part of a Cancer Reviewing Awareness Program.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Something more passive, or functional from greater distances, might be safer for the operator... Otherwise you will need an expensive robot.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
you can get the fingerprint of every type of material in the known universe and use it for lots of different applications from hunting for gold and other metals, to finding the optimum soil conditions for growing vegetables, to finding cancer in humans (maybe - i hope)
i can see lots of good this can do...
Star Treck - sounds like the tricorder device Spock used to use analizing the local environment when they land on some strange planet...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The government should regulate our ability to use reflected energy to identify and examine objects.
This teqnique looks similar to Near-InfraRed spectroscopy, or may be that's it - the article does not give any details. Nothing really new - you need to collect "fingerprints" from pure substances first and then you can identify it in a mixture.Wikipedia articles of interest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_infrared and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemometrics.
Isn't this what the Tricoder from Star Trek did?
I wonder if this technology is sensitive enough to detect Bush's brain cell?
We have walk-through drug screening as you walk into work? As with the concerns about RFID chips in passports and other devices, I am concerned about remote sensing of personal information (and that includes your internal biochemistry) without adequte protection of informed consent. And, no, I don't trust the government. Why should I?
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
TFA gives a couple of weird things:
1) they have a picture 9 km away, from ABOVE, of a nuclear plant taken with the imager. So, is it hooked up to a satellite, or a very high-flying plane?
2) I have a method that can detect a running nuclear plant from miles away - it's called "look". If I "look" and steam is coming out of the cooling towers, then it's running!
stuff |
What if we wrap the materials we want to hide in thick lead, and wrap that inside a farraday cage?
then what?
does this still work?
1) they have a picture 9 km away, from ABOVE, of a nuclear plant taken with the imager. So, is it hooked up to a satellite, or a very high-flying plane?
Good luck getting a satellite to orbit at 30,000 feet.
Nitroglycerine was detected on their hands and they were imprisoned on this "evidence". One of them died in prison before the conviction was quashed.
The application of these technologies needs to be used carefully, especially they are far more sensitive than the technologies employed in the 70s. Perhaps good for screening, but we must careful in trusting them when it comes to the courts.
If it works out then goodbye surprise car bombs, land mines, and explosive belts.
:)
Make it work and i'll buy you a Coke
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Scanners....I love Star Trek.
passively scanning poison gas at 60 meters and getting it right, that is sci-fi.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Ordinarily, I wouldn't discount such robotics. Over the years, many great things have been done in robotics using COTS "junk" and such by such amateurs. Unfortunately, this whole thing seems to scream "scam" to me. Those transducers on the front seem like speakers ripped from some center channel surround sound speaker. The metal-shell body with small access panels, a cheesy light on top, along with an even cheesier obviously fake dish antenna (with no apparent directional control - what is the point of such an antenna, which if it was real would be directional, and would need directional control for communications on a mobile platform?), which looks like it came from one of those "get cable signal quality without a cable box" scam antenna's from the 1980's. Finally, the wheels and such look like they belong to a cheap radio-control 4WD "monster truck" toy - complete to the "bling chrome" rims. Which wouldn't be much of an issue, except it doesn't look like the thing can turn, unless it is using differential steering instead of Ackerman (sp?) (which would be the normal mode of steering for a RC vehicle unless it was a tank, which the wheels don't appear to be from).
The thing just looks cheap, cheap, cheap - and not at all like something you would expect - even a prototype - to look like for research and development purposes where there is money supposedly being invested. I have seen more highly advanced amateur robots built using COTS parts found on Ebay, by dudes in their garages on shoestring budgets, that were way better built than this thing. Honestly, it looks like something I once cobbled together when I was a kid in grammar school. It just has an air of a scam - it looks like the equivalent of those scam perpetual "energy motors" and their inventors that you see so often. Stuff enough crap together, stick it in front of an audience not versed in what they are seeing, ask for some money for investment - standard scam stuff. Finally - normally I wouldn't comment on this - but what kind of facial expression is that on that man (Manuel Salinas)? He looks somewhere between drunk, stoned, and hit with a 2x4. Maybe he just was having a bad day?
Anyhow - enough of what I think. I did some googling on the guy and his robot. A few minutes of research turned up this blog entry about the guy and his "technology"...
Scam? Most likely...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
FTFA:
>
Other tests can detect these agents, but may take four hours or longer. "While this method may not be as precise as other methods, such as bioassays and biochips, it can be an early warning to start other tests sooner," said Raptis.
>
New technology is great and successful identification tests are good, but they only mention looking for conditions not the absence of those conditions. None of it matters much if you get frequent false positives, just ask the border patrol what they think of their current sensor systems and all the wasted trips they make to investigate wandering cattle or curious foxes.
I can rest assured that this technology will only be used to catch terrorists and certainly never to infringe on my constitutionally protected right to be secure in my person, house, papers, and effects. Unless I'm at an airport. Or a public street. Or looking suspicious. Or sitting in my house.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
Soon the RIAA won't need dogs to sniff out those evil dvd's..
So it's a kind of Eye Of Argonne ?
I happen to live about 10 miles (~ 15 km) from a running nuclear plant, and I don't remember ever see steam coming from the cooling towers. There's been fog on the cooling lake from time to time, but not continuously. Now, this is one of the more modern plants (on line in 1987), so that may make a difference.
In an unrelated story, television psychic Miss Cleo has died and come back reincarnated in robotic form. Film at 11.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Technologies that were formerly infeasible or unreliable frequently take on new life as the sweeping wave of information technology washes by.
Thus, an ancient, esoteric, expensive, and minimally useful technology (rotational spectroscopy) is suddenly viable as a new, privacy-piercing technology.
Which brings me to my point: Are we going to sit back and watch our freedoms erode due to the lack of the basic privacy we've taken for granted for so long, or are we going to restructure our society so that we can preserve our freedoms despite the fact that privacy is dying its last breaths?
Link goes to the most insightful and useful article I've ever seen that illucidates the problem nicely, while providing a solution we can sink our teeth into. If you haven't read it yet, I strongly urge you to do so.
Where the United States goes, I can only guess. But I'm quite sure that the next free society will apply the lessons in the link above.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
(TRIMprob stands for Tissue Resonance InterferoMeter Probe)
In the long run we are all dead. - John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946)
was that in a hot climate?, in Michigan water vapor was visible most the time, and made huge clouds into the sky in the spring/fall/winter. Of course, that was 500 feet from my desk window, not 10 miles.
Yeah, I know they must hype it this way in the press releases to get their crumb from the DHS quadrillion-dollar table, but I'd really like to see some greater perspective every now and then. Terrorism has killed what, 400 americans/year over the last decade. Even measured in human lives THz sensing is probably going to save half that without relation to national security at all. Well, I guess as long as they're just funded it'll be ok. Just don't ask me to write the PR.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
They have created the radar equivalent of the widely used IR spectroscopy. There is a technique for an isolated, single sample - IR spectroscopy - which requires you to dissolve the sample in a solvent and place it on a salt crystal. The new technology gives this literally new dimensions - two, as you can see should you RTFA, by using terahertz frequencies. Terahertz frequencies are difficult to generate experimentally and their behavior is largely unknown to science, unlike IR (can be created by a lamp) or radio (can be created by an oscillator). This application is truly revolutionary.
This invention is comparable to MRI (nuclear magnetic resonance imaging), which is tomography with NMR, which also was a "dissolved sample only" kind of spectroscopy. Introducting gradients to the field allowed you to locate the resonating nuclei in two dimensions, enabling tomography in three dimensions.
Expect a Nobel Prize in physics for this.
FWIW, here is a link to this missing thread...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
FTFA:
Identified chemicals related to defense applications, including nuclear weapons, from 600 meters away using passive sensing at the Nevada Test Site.
Passive, as in detecting THz radiation naturally emitted from a target, not projecting THz radiation at the taget you were refering to. That is, unless said enterprising terrorist builds a trigger that goes off whence it detects the THz radiation emitted by his/her bomb. We could only be so lucky.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
This technology really isnt new. One of my profs at michigan tech was working on a similar technology to detect land mines, but the extremely weak radio frequincies and interference from surronding radio waves presented a huge huge problem...i wonder how that was solved...NRQ is basically the same thing as what an MRI is (close anyway)
9 km is only about 30,000 ft. Not that high really. It was most likely installed on a jet, not a satellite.
These are Indian, Iranian, and Chinese family names.
I hope that everyone recognizes that this contribution to the national security of the United States was probably made by recent immigrants.
I'd bet that ports, be they of the air or water variety (and maybe border crossings), are going to be the major place that this is useful. High-security buildings may get this kind of thing too.