Blowing On Money To Tell If It Is Counterfeit

HughPickens.com writes Scientific American reports that simply breathing on money could soon reveal if it's the real deal or counterfeit thanks to a photonic crystal ink developed by Ling Bai and Zhongze Gu and colleagues at Southeast University in Nanjing, China that can produce unique color changing patterns on surfaces with an inkjet printer system which would be extremely hard for fraudsters to reproduce. The ink mimics the way Tmesisternus isabellae – a species of longhorn beetle – reversibly switches its color from gold to red according to the humidity in its environment. The color shift is caused by the adsorption of water vapor in their hardened front wings, which alters the thickness and average refractive index of their multilayered scales. To emulate this, the team made their photonic crystal ink using mesoporous silica nanoparticles, which have a large surface area and strong vapor adsorption capabilities that can be precisely controlled. The complicated and reversible multicolor shifts of mesoporous CPC patterns are favorable for immediate recognition by naked eyes but hard to copy. "We think the ink's multiple security features may be useful for antifraud applications," says Bai, "however we think the technology could be more useful for fabricating multiple functional sensor arrays, which we are now working towards."

Comments

High security

[Anonymous Coward]

Where on earth would anyone get hold of a ink jet printer?

Life lessons from craps

[PopeRatzo]

This isn't so crazy.

I know for a fact that having a hot girl blow on my dice helps me make that eight the hard way.

Re:Blow all you want

[roman_mir]

Correct, all modern currencies are counterfeit, including the bitcoins. The countries that have high productive output, like China have currencies that are as counterfeit as the largest welfare recipients, like the USA.

Fake money is created all over the world to steal productivity of the individuals to subsidise the powerful government Mafia structures. The people are hurt, the wealth is stolen. The difference is that while the Chinese government is stealing from the Chinese people with inflation, USA government is stealing from the Chinese as well, such is the property of being 'world reserve currency'. You get to steal from other nations with your inflation while the rest can only steal from their own.