So like I know in atleast American airports you can get randomly selected or if your bag is searched they run a little swab on your hands or stuff. They say it’s for explosives residue which makes sense to check for but how do these tests work?
It seems like explosives could be made out of a huge variety of things that are accessible. Two easy ones that come to mind are gunpowder and gasoline. What test shows all the main potential explosive ingredients? Or do they just only check for a couple?
In: Chemistry
There are a lot of things that can explode, but the vast majority of them do it in the same way. They have a bunch of nitrogen atoms, and when the nitrogen is freed from whatever it’s attached to, they immediately grab onto each other and release a bunch of energy. You can get a very solid first guess by looking to see if the swab has a bunch of nitrogen on it.
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