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

Re:Because the internet is just a bunch of tubes.

[digitrev]

Series of Tubes

Re:Machine super-sensitivity: not "a good thing"

[Jere H]

Your math is off twice.
70,000 / 365 is 200, not 2,000, which doesn't really matter because:

70,000,000 * .01% is 7,000 searches per year, not 70,000.
So it would still be about 20 per day. They already do more random searches per day than this.

Machine super-sensitivity: is a good thing

[Colin Smith]

Mass spectrometers are much better than 99.99% accurate. Down to parts per billion is fairly common, and the pre Mass Spectrometer stage (gas, liquid chromatograph, or in this case, selected ion flow tube) manipulates out compounds you don't want to analyse. That doesn't mean you set the trigger level of the number of molecules at 1, or 10 molecules, you set it at a level which would indicate that there are quantities of explosives present.

The nice thing about this tech is it's very fast compared to gcms or lcms. I wouldn't count it out, it looks interesting.