dave-in-nj:
anyone notice that this thread is 3 pages long and no one is discussing any actual devcies ?
http://www.figarosensor.com
figarosensor makes multiple gas sensors. not sure if there is one as sensitive as a dog.
metal detectors can find metals.
the question of a belt with the wrong stuff, is there a sensor that could tell if a human was wearing a coat (or clothes) or carrying a book ?
The simplest, cheapest and most abundant. detector is "Eyeball MK I" combined with "probing fingers". It just requires people to take off most of their clothes and being fondled.
But it is slow, labor intensive and intrusive.
And worst of all, it gives no stand off for the operators.
The bomber may not reach his primary target, but at least he can scream "All hail the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Praised be His juicy meatballs)" and blow up the checkpoint, the security operators and the other people waiting in line. It has a perfectly good effect from a terroristic point of view.
You need the stand off, and that is where the problem is. It all comes down to signal/noise ratio.
There is a lot of noise, and in practical applications (with wind, dirt, sunlight lots of people in lots of different clothing and doused with perfume, sweat and 50 shades of grime) it is very hard to get a decent signal*, especially from something that is not particularly volatile (like most explosives).
Dogs are efficient, but they still need to get reasonably close, to pin point the source. The gas sensor has the same problem.
(And we are back to the stand off problem).
*Measuring is always about that. Produce a signal that tells you something about what you want to know, and get decent signal to noise ratio.
Blasting the general population with ionizing radiation, huge magnetic field or eyeball sizzling lasers (to excite any interesting compound enough to make it send out a characteristic signal) will normally be frowned upon.
(They do not let children go through the "perfectly harmless full body scanner" at the airport.....)