Researchers have developed a new, super-senitive, bomb-sniffing chip

Let’s face it: the theatrical security procedures at airports aren’t going away any time soon. However, they might just get more tolerable if a team of Israeli researchers bring a new, extremely sensitive bomb detection chip to an inspection line near you. The prototype sniffs for explosives by using groups of nano-scale transistors that react to tiny electrical changes when certain chemicals pass by. And we do mean tiny — the chip can raise alarms if there are just a few molecules found out of 1,000 trillion. For those not keeping score, previous techniques will ‘only’ raise a red flag in the molecules per billion range.