• Question: Do you think your work could help prevent terrorist attacks?

    Asked by askjeeves to Emily on 17 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Emily Cook

      Emily Cook answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      One of the ideas behind it is that it could identify explosive materials so could prevent them being taken onto a plane and prevent incidents like 9/11.

      However there are many ways of detecting explosives already. A big issue at the moment is ‘false positive results’. These are bags the are flagged up as suspicious by preliminary scans that turn out to be harmless but take up a lot of money and time to be checked out. Hopefully new scanning techniques will be more specific and fewer safe bags will have to go through more intense searching procedures.

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