4 ms·

Hi, Have you tried concealing things under a couple of inches of a biological material and wrapping that to the body (beer gut, pregnant lady)? Specifically,

• kmowery 12y ago
  Yes we did! Any organic material shows up pretty well under backscatter X-ray, and so can be used to cover darker contraband. You can see this done with Teflon in our gallery: https://www.radsec.org/gallery.html https://www.radsec.org/gallery.html under "Concealing a Knife by Masking". We didn't try meat due to the mess, but it would almost certainly work as well! (Technically, in this X-ray energy spectrum, the amount of backscatter is related to the "effective Z" of the material, where Z is the atomic number of the elements involved. Materials made from lighter elements like carbon and oxygen? Backscatters well. Heavy elements like iron? Absorbs x-rays.)
  • batbomb 12y ago
    Yeah, I guess I thought they might have something a bit more spectographically advanced to determine molecular makeup rather than just backscatter (something that might distinguish teflon with it's abundance of fluorine from organic matter). It seems like a much more crude instrument than I thought. For millimeter wave, I'm pretty sure the teflon wouldn't work though, since the millimeter wave machines are likely tuned for organic makeup rather than just backscatter.