New Explosive Detection Tech

cruci writes to tell us Yahoo! is reporting that a New Zealand company, Syft, has developed a new way to detect many different kinds of explosives (and their individual ingredients) in real time. Designed for what the company calls "photocopier simplicity", CEO Geoff Peck claims that the technology is ready to deploy immediately and is already deployed in some ports and hospitals. From the article: "The Voice100(TM) employs Selected Ion Flow Tube - Mass Spectrometry (SIFT-MS). While SIFT-MS has been in academic use for more than 20 years, Syft Technologies is the first company to offer a commercial instrument with the full discriminating analytical power of a laboratory-grade mass spectrometer."

Comments

Tubes

[p0tat03]

"The Voice100(TM) employs Selected Ion Flow Tube..."

It's a bunch of tubes I tell you!

Alternate method

[nizo]

Try to light all suspicious materials on fire. Nice and cheap (all you need is some guy you pay minimum wage with a handheld lighter). For larger items, have a can of hairspray handy to use as a cheap flamethrower.