PHEW, what an invention! A device that sniffs out tiny quantities of mustard gas and lewisite on the go could help protect workers tasked with cleaning up chemical weapons.
Identifying mystery molecules often requires sophisticated equipment and slow preliminary steps to concentrate samples. Instead, the new approach uses water vapour in the air to process the sample before analysis.
Air containing a potential weapon sample is drawn into the device and zapped with electricity, charging the vapour, which starts to break down chemicals in the sample. A counter stream of air whisks away any highly reactive ions created by the zap that might otherwise destroy small amounts of the broken-down weapon molecules. What's left is then identified by a mass spectrometer.
Yasuo Seto of the National Research Institute of Police Science in Japan, who led the work, says his device can detect concentrations one hundredth of fatal levels and has begun using it to search for weapons abandoned in China after the second world war (Analytical Chemistry, doi.org/x6m).
This article appeared in print under the headline "Quick sniff for chemical weapons"
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