MANHASSET, N.Y. Michael Henning recalls a yellow light and then silver lines flashing before his eyes. The light came from one of the four terrorist bombs detonated in London last week; the silver lines were flying shards of glass.
Though badly cut around his face, Henning was a fortunate survivor of the series of attacks, which killed more than 50 and injured more than 700. As the world reacted to the news from London, the question arose again: How can technology help prevent such attacks?
Detecting a bomb in a public space like a bus or a building is technologically doable, according to engineers and researchers working on such devices today. The solutions won't come cheap, and it will be at least a year before devices sensitive enough to prevent disasters like last week's bombings are deployed.
But "when terrorists are willing to go to the extremes we have seen, the one thing we have to fight them is technology," said Bonner Denton, a professor at University of
Denton has invented a capacitive transimpedance amplifier that he claims increases the sensitivity of ion-mobility spectrometers by a thousandfold, thereby enabling 100 percent of passengers to be efficiently screened. Denton collaborated with researchers at Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque, N.M.) to develop the device. Sandia is using it in a "microhound" explosives detector that it says will replace bomb-sniffing dogs.
Bogdan Maglich is cautiously optimistic that technology will help foil terror attacks. "Dogs are great, but they take six months to train and don't work well in the heat," said Maglich, chief executive officer and founder of HiEnergy Technologies Inc. (Irvine, Calif.). On the other hand, "dogs have hundreds of billions of neurons," he said, whereas "the best electronic systems only have 100,000."
Maglich and his team recognizing that conventional X-rays are, as he put it, "chemically blind" turned to stoichiometry as a means of deciphering the empirical chemical formulas of substances.
In the team's scenario, abandoned packages or suspect car trunks are blasted with neutrons, and the signature of the emitted gamma rays is then used to determine the chemical makeup of the contents in anywhere from 15 seconds to 5 minutes, depending on the enclosure. The results can be analyzed on a remote PDA or laptop with an optical or wireless connection.
The big problem with airports and mass-transit systems is the large number of passengers who need to be screened quickly and unobtrusively. Airports today use screening portals, but it takes several seconds to screen each person. Thus, the portals are impractical for mass-transit systems used by millions every day.
Remote and real-time
New technologies with vastly increased sensitivity will not only allow more rapid passenger screening but will also detect concealed explosives from a distance.