http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... rts-cobalt

That's... a game changer. If it works. Thoughts? Cos I wouldn't pretend to understand the science...

My initial thoughts are the scanners would be an utterly waste of money, as there is in fact no evidence of a passenger carrying a liquid explosive (let alone a binary one) posing any actual threat to an airliner. Ever. The 100ml liquids limit is and always has been bollocks, so spending god knows how much on scanners so they can remove the limit is the worst sort of arse. I'd immediately be looking at who has shares in the scanner manufacturers.

No. That case was simply that there was a plot that the authorities decided was worth prosecuting. That doesn't actually mean the device they were planning to make would have worked. In fact I've seen analysis of their plan by reputable chemists that suggests they'd have done little more than create a bad smell. Plotting a terrorist attack is an offense, prosecuting someone for doing so doesn't require the plot to necessarily be that good.
Note that even in this example they couldn't convince a jury they would actually have blown up a plane, just that they were planning to do so.

Well I guess we have a story of competing technologies that are both, in a sense, too good to be true.

I would have thought that in principle a liquid with sufficient boom power to poke a hole in fuselage, but stable enough to not go boom before flight was possible. But I don't know [LIFTED] about explosives, so I must defer to those who do.

The detector sounds like crazy science fiction, and puts me in mind of the novelty golf ball detector in more sophisticated packaging. But I probably know even less about lasers than I do about explosives.

If it's as good as they say, you'd expect them to use it to find drug mules with packets of herion up their butts - something which apparently does happen every day at lots of airports.

This sounds to me like a varriation on Raman Spectroscopy - Spatially offset Raman spectroscopy.

I've never used it myself but Raman is a pretty powerful analytical technique for chemical analysis. Most of the Raman instruments I've heard about work towards the upper end of infrared part of the spectrum.
The science they're claiming it's based on is sound and widely used in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries so there's no reason it couldn't have been adapted to work as an explosives detector at airports.


Alas, the greater the number and/or complexity of the layers between the laser source/detector and target the more complex the analysis process becomes. Also the laser can't penetrate more than a few mm into the object. Trying to detect something at an unknown depth within a structure as complex as a body is simply beyond the technology. On the other hand, if they manage to recover the drug packets from the mule they can tell what's in them without having to open them which means they can make an arrest with a high degree of confiedence about what's been smuggled before the substance is sent to a proper lab for confirmatory forensic analysis.

Aha! My butt cavity is once more safe from prying lazers.

Oh, I don't know. It's not the lasers you have to worry about it's the nitrile gloves

I draw your attention to a 747 that was nearly blown out of the sky with a liquid bomb. The only reason it wasn't was because the seat layout on that flight was different to the usual plane on that route. The bomber thought he'd planned it over the central fuel tank.
I believe it was a Philippine airlines flight. I forget the flight number.

Google flight 434