New Explosive Detection Tech

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Wednesday August 16, 2006 @06:53AM from the but-can-it-reduce-the-groping dept.

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."

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What's the point by z0I!) · 2006-08-16 07:00 · Score: 5, Interesting

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:Machine super-sensitivity: not "a good thing" by Jere+H · 2006-08-16 07:15 · Score: 5, Informative

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.