Word: detective
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...foiled terror plot in Great Britain aimed to exploit vulnerabilities in airport security, but new technology may help patch those holes. In recent months, the Transportation Security Administration has begun testing a new tool for detecting such materials, security industry sources tell TIME. The device, Ahura's FirstDefender, is a handheld chemical identification system about the size of a hardcover book. The FBI, U.S. Customs and Immigration and the Department of Homeland Security have already begun using the gadget to detect and identify chemical hazards, but it hasn't yet been implemented in airports. The TSA recently deployed...
...particularly devious innovation of the London plotters was their alleged use of liquid explosives or explosive components, which are easily concealed in many of the items found in most travelers' hand luggage - perfume, hair gel, deodorant, medicines, drinks, toothpaste, lotions, and so on - and are extremely difficult to detect. Metal detectors will obviously miss them. While there have been some "puffer" explosive-detection machines placed in some U.S. airports, they are few and far between - and aren't made to detect liquid explosives in sealed containers...
...even the best of them visually identifying a liquid explosive in an innocuous bottle are slim - that's why Israel's Ben Gurion airport has a laboratory in the basement to conduct instant tests of liquids found on suspect passengers. If the U.S. system lacks sufficient technology to detect liquid explosives, and if it relies on the TSA screeners to ID possible terrorists, it is, at best, a wire mesh fence...
...similar to the one already operating in the Pacific Ocean. Germany, Japan, the U.S. and others helped to upgrade the region's shore-based tide-gauge stations, which can measure the sea-level changes caused by a tsunami, and planned to install sophisticated deep-ocean buoys off Indonesia to detect tsunamis when they're still out to sea. By last month, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the U.N. body leading the international effort, declared that an interim alert system was up and running. Warnings would be relayed to Indian Ocean nations from existing tsunami-monitoring centers...
...Those centers, which rapidly interpret earthquake data sent in by seismic observatories around the world, detected last week's Java tsunami. But due to gaps in the way a tsunami alert is broadcast to the public, no warnings reached the people on the Javanese beaches?underscoring just how difficult it still is to protect the most vulnerable countries from killer tidal waves. "Let's not kid ourselves and think we solved the warning problem because we can detect a tsunami and say, 'It's coming,'" says Laura Kong, head of the International Tsunami Information Center in Honolulu. "We have...