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

What's the point

[z0I!)]

IANAC (I am not a chemist) but this guy seems to make a pretty solid arguement: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/200608/msg00087.html

Re:Tubes

[andrewman327]

Certainly not a truck bomb!

Anyway, mass spectrometry is an interesting technology that works very very well in the lab. The question is how practical can they make this machine? How much does it cost? TFA talks about how terrorism is mega expesive, so I get the feeling that they are just trying to lessen the sticker shock. And as the saying goes, no matter how idiotproof they make the device, TSA will just make a better idiot.

Fortunately (according to the manufacturer) this machine finds more than your run of the mill explosives, it can also find drugs:

The instrument has been calibrated to identify narcotics, chemical warfare agents such as the nerve gas Sarin, toxic industrial chemicals, and peroxide-based explosives including TATP and HMTD, both used in the July 2005 London bombings.