A next-generation bottled liquid scanner from Los Alamos National Laboratory called MagViz BLS is demonstrated at the Albuquerque International Sunport, New Mexico.
Transcript
00:00:12 and after the 2006 transatlantic Terror plot was uh broken up over in England um the Transportation Security Administration imposed the 311 rule as was a carefully thought out risk mitigation concept of operations or conops so the American public could travel safely um but that's that's interfered with the convenience of the public it's slowed down Commerce a
00:00:39 little bit and it hasn't really given us the full measure of security that we would like to achieve the Prototype that we see here today will offer great promise for efficiently discriminating threat materials and liquids and the design seems amenable to commercial adoption The Innovation that you'll see here comes from the contributions of many people and it began in the early
00:00:59 days as a partnership between between DHS and Los Alamos National Labs leveraging NIH investments in low field brain Imaging techniques and we saw a promising approach for being able to discriminate liquids at the molecular level just as in an MRI machine information provided about the difference between fat and muscle or benign tissue and a cancerous tissue
00:01:21 we're able to make classifications about liquids whether they're threat liquids or benign liquids that are okay for people to take on you'll see two devices one device is a little bit larger uh it's a direct descendant of the larger Magis instrument that we brought down uh it has the same sensor technology which is called the superconducting quantum interference device or squid so if you
00:01:45 hear us talking about the squids we don't have marine life trapped in the instrument they they detectors that drives the size it drives the complexity of the instrument but the squid Remains the world's most sensitive magnetic field detector uh the second unit that you'll see up there is smaller it's more compact doesn't use a squid runs at room
00:02:05 temperature um and so we're really pushing hard towards getting as much signal as we can with uh the most mainstream and easily Deployable equipment that we can find what um the device is doing right now what it's doing during the 15 seconds is applying a magnetic field not a large field um aligning some magnetization inside of the sample and then manipulating that
00:02:33 magnetization and looking how it evolves over the scan time how that evolves is characteristic of the material that's inside in the case of this can is one of those fake cans I showed you and it's actually filled with acetone so it's not it's not seven up we've taken a step towards a more Compact and uh smaller scale unit that could be put at the checkpoint as a
00:03:03 secondary screener and that's technology that could be more rapidly deployed to the airport this is a secondary screening tool so I don't know depending on how they deploy it if it would speed up the line but what it does do is there are people who show up at the checkpoint every day with legitimate reasons why they need to exceed the 311 rule a medical condition that requires a liquid
00:03:28 medicine um infant form you know things they want to carry on board the aircraft that are you know legitimate things that need to be greater than the 3 o restriction and right now screeners don't have great tools for making sure that those things can go on board and it would go a long way towards easing the you know the discomfort in the passengers of having
00:03:48 to discard perfectly good items at the checkpoint to be able to to have this Tool The Next Step that we would really like to see is a real commercialization techology so that it can get out to the and I think at the same time as I said taking the lessons that we learned from this and and translating them back to our efforts in in brain Imaging because just as this technology is really good
00:04:16 for portable Mr for an airport I think it would make a real difference in portable Mr for emergency rooms for battlefields for for people who can't get Highfield MRIS
