Article - New technology to spot explosives in crowd
 

http://www.popsci.com/node/42677/?cmpid=enews011410

Seems promising.

The article says it is prone to false positives. That is absolutely deadly in this business.

I didn't quite understand why we'd need the ability to track and locate explosives in a crowd. Shouldn't it be enough to detect their presence? After all, people are inherently serialized when going through screening, one at a time: if the explosives detector spots something, then you have a pretty good idea who to search.

As a result I'm not convinced this will be terribly helpful in practice.

This sounds doomed to failure like the puffers. I wonder if TSA addressed/would be smart enough to address "maintenance" issues and and do testing in a real environment. Nah .... :rolleyes:

The famed fart detector is now a reality!!!! Ain't science grand.

Back in the 1960's and possible even earlier the Navy had a device that could sniff the exhaust fumes of a snorkeling submarine from patrol aircraft. I have no idea what the ppm rate was but surely in the preceeding almost 50 years devices could have been invented that could sniff out almost any desire compound.

Where is an engineer when ya need one?

Clearly not working for, contracting for, or consulting for TSA.