New Scanner Sees Explosives Inside Body Cavities
The workers at a Merrillville company have spent the past six months developing their own form of airport security, a machine they say is superior to the metal detectors and body scanners making the news.
Guns, explosive powders, plastic weapons, the machine can show them all, no matter where they're at.
Even if they’re inside a human body.
If everything goes according to their plan, the Purdue Technology Center incubator-based Nesch LLC will see its product in airports worldwide helping to stop terrorists from using airplanes as their personal weapons.
The device called Diffraction-Enhanced X-ray Imaging, or DEXI, is basically an X-ray machine on steroids — but with far fewer X-rays. A normal X-ray machine will use three sources — light absorption, refraction and scattering — to produce one image. Because the light refractions and light scatterings don't mix well, the result is a blurry image, one that picks up on bones but not soft tissue.
Ivan Nesch, CEO of Nesch LLC, says that DEXI creates a separate image from each of the sources that makes for not just clearer pictures but allows people to see softer material — including powders like the one a Nigerian man supposedly brought with him on a Christmas Day flight to blow up the plane.
“(With conventional X-ray machines,) you could not even think about this,” Nesch said.
Pictures provided by Nesch show various objects taken with a conventional X-ray and the DEXI system. In conventional X-rays, plastic bags filled with powder are obscured but are clearly seen in images taken by DEXI. Another DEXI image shows a plastic knife hidden in another object.
Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/crack-new-scanner-finds-explosives-inside-body-cavities/#ixzz0cGhW23gG
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A) So far the only attempt that I know of to use explosives inside a body cavity failed to even injure the target… who was standing right directly in front of the “rectum bomber”.
B) Explosive used for nefarious purposes are so rare, that this can’t possibly be useful to anyone. Even at airports. Way Way past the point of diminishing returns…. by far.
C) You are still exposing people to X-Rays. Less or not… your machine is almost guaranteed to kill more people than it can possibly save. (though, you wont know who those people are, and it will be years down the road, so you wont have to feel responsible for being a murderer)
D) Searching for specific signs of specific plots in specific places is ineffective at stopping terrorism. Terrorist tactics are as easily adapted to shopping malls as air ports. Best case scenario, is targets change. People still die.
I am not impressed. Seems dosing people with dangerous radiation should be RESERVED for legitimate medical need as determined by medical professionals. I will never fly again if you install these.
-Steve