Smart Security Tech - Cool Stuff: How It Works - S01 EP04 - Science Documentary
[Applause] on this episode of cool stuff cool security staying safe in a world that's getting more dangerous by the minute today the threat's much more sophisticated keeping one step ahead of the bad guys explosive materials bombs this x-ray technology really knows where the next hit's coming from close and personal with a biometric identification system that beats fingerprints hands down the eyes don't lie it's made a lot faster one look is all it takes now it's instant I'll test my strength against some incredible body armor it didn't puncture at all and the coolest thing of all it's actually a liquid but it be caves like Steel and there is no hole whatsoever now that's smart security the world is full of cool stuff I'm Steve Truitt how come I'm not feeling anything and I want to know how it works I'll be riding the Leading Edge of innovation pulling apart Today's Hottest Technologies and presenting them in ways you've never imagined join me on a journey into the Hidden World of cool stuff seems we can't go anywhere now without being quizzed scanned or photographed but in some places maximum security is not just a precaution it's a necessity in prisons Across America identifying inmates has gone Way Beyond stenciled numbers on striped shirts be confident we have the right people coming in and going out of Maximum Security and now biometrics unique body measurements are giving us that certainty no one can fool this Iris scam [Music] Irish recognition is far more accurate than any other biometric including fingerprints facial recognition and other forms of biometric identification it's the colored ring around your pupil is an intricate and unique Kaleidoscope of tissue that doesn't change after puberty no one has your iris pattern in fact you don't even have the same pattern in both eyes [Music] if you consider the iris itself it's one of the most unique structures of the human body if we were to compare your left and your right Iris for instance there's one chance in 10 to the 70th power that they would match so not only do you have one unique Iris you have two unique hybrides possible to change the structure of your iris unless you damage it so the chances of fooling an iris recognition system are almost zero I think I like stuff over here but to be sure you have the right match you need an extremely accurate profile go ahead and open your eye really wide look in the mirror this digital camera starts the process two quick snapshots and officers capture a prisoner's identity [Music] the images only need to be black and white because it's the iris structure not its color that's unique a small infrared light enhances the detail by eliminating Reflections from the cornea once the images are captured some smart mathematics takes over in the form of software analysis thank you [Music] that Digital Image just then processed by an algorithm called the Dogman two Pi algorithm which is basically a mathematical process converting the digital image into a binary template this algorithm or mathematical formula calculates points of difference in the image it's recording relationships between many tiny features the more points the more uniqueness and the greater the certainty Iris scan uses 200 points of difference just to be sure these points are then converted into a digital template that's unique to each Iris that camper is then stored at a later time when we capture an image with this camera or one of our other cameras again that new templates are compared with a tired database of templates and the correct one is matched now inside of prison it's not just accuracy that matters it's the time it takes officers to verify they have the right inmate with Iris scan technology that's less than 10 seconds it's made it a lot faster especially before if somebody wouldn't give us their real identification we would have to fingerprint them and wait for it usually extended period of time 30 to 40 minutes to find out who someone was now it's instant there's no waiting and no doubt and come release day no mistakes someone comes into the jail and is booked into the system we catch their Irish parents when they're ready to be released they can be absolutely certain at releasing the right person turning our eyes into digital IDs may take a bit of getting used to but when you want certainty eyes will never lie we saw how Iris scan helps prison officers to be sure they have their man face another problem every day the risk of attack despite the best security inmates still end up with weapons they make on their own and they're lethal probably one of our most dangerous ones is possession of a ruler we're able to Fashion that basically into Shanks they're known as you make the wrong move and uh if you're not watching out they can attack you enough to enough to kill you you might wonder why officers don't use military style armor one reason is they need to be free to react in emergencies body armor would just slow them down and make them even more vulnerable to assault but here at the materials research laboratory of the U.S army they may have the answer [Music] lightweight clothing that's absolutely stab proof and the secret isn't the fabric it's this stuff armor in a bottle flexible materials like Kevlar are great at stopping bullets but surprisingly it's almost useless stopping a knife [Music] so this is four layers of fabric and this is a type of fabric you'd use in body armor police vests even army vests what I want you to do is take a little swing and go ahead and try to pop through that fabric okay thank you not too big not too hard it it went right through didn't it okay and if you look this Kevlar isn't going to save a prison officer from a shanking okay now this looks like a cool experiment where are we to see why Eric's put the Kevlar Swatch under a microscope so that's pretty good in Focus you can see how the spike pushes around the tough fibers it just slides right between them so no matter how tough the fibers are a sharp blade can just slip through before we moved it to the side moved it to the side they call that windowing sometimes it's kind of like making a window right and there's something sharp in point you can go in between the fibers that makes sense right see how far things are getting stretched and moved out of the way so fiber strength means zip when it comes to a shake add some liquid armor to fill the gaps really give it a good one and it's a different story yeah give it another one another one I'm going Lefty it didn't puncture at all I mean it made a dent but it didn't puncture no it would hurt pretty bad but you're not going to have a spike going through your vital organs right it's probably better for you this super strong goo is called Shear thickening fluid okay so how did you make this well this actually has two parts in it it's a liquid and a solid combined so the liquid is this thing here it's called polyethylene glycol it's a polymeric liquid very safe it's kind of like antifreeze but you can actually eat it but you combine this with a solid phase which in this case is a powder it's silica powder so silica is glass but it's very special the way we combine these this that you have in your hand right was actually this amount of liquid mixed with this amount of powder so how does this stuff work the billions of silica nanoparticles more than 100 times finer than human hair mix easily and evenly in the glycol [Music] in a liquid state the particles have a weak molecular surface charge so they don't Clump together to form a solid but when an object impacts the liquid it changes radically the object's kinetic energy forces the particles together and they lock in a lattice with strong chemical bonds called a hydro cluster the liquid becomes as hard as ceramic for a Split Second then when the kinetic energy is spent the bonds release and the solution becomes liquid again it's truly amazing so I want you to push in there real slowly with that rod what you're going to see is there's not much resistance it's kind of like a liquid it's going down to the bottom smoothly okay but if You Yank in a big hurry on it oh yeah it will not let go so once you stop pushing on it it'll kind of go back to liquid again it would fall off that spoon and come out again when I apply strong kinetic energy there's no way I can push through as soon as I stop pushing the Silicon particles let go tough is ceramic but still a liquid which means it soaks right into the woven Kevlar this fluid is crammed in between all the little tiny filaments in this fabric you see a little excess you know at the intersections but it's really really in there we're looking through the microscope again this time I'm trying to pierce some treated Kevlar are the Fabric's moving but there's no windowing there's no separation of the fabric all it cares about is that you're pushing a lot of it in some way in this case right now you can feel feel how tight yeah and you can see it's pushing it in that's right so things are getting squeezed in there even though it's not shearing it's under stress it still looks like fabric remember before those Yarns were getting pushed and pulled and it looks like somebody took a yarn started ganking on things took the fabric here everything is still pretty and pretty much intact so it's a big Improvement on the raw fibers but this technology is meant to save real lives in a tough world and most hardcore prisoners pack a far bigger punch than I do I didn't have much luck it didn't puncture at all I mean it made a dent that it didn't punch [Music] but what about a brutal stab from a big bad guy this thing here I want you to kind of squeeze it well I can't find one here in the Army's materials research lab so we're going to drop this stainless steel Spike from eight feet that's equivalent to a blow from someone weighing 230 pounds now at that height that's a pretty good step so that's a big strong person on a good day but people can stab that hard 289 3 there it is three two one and it did it bent wow it really bent even a massive blow like this doesn't make it all the way through The Shield of Clump silica particles held strong and there is no hole whatsoever the powerful kinetic energy made the silica particles lock tight into a ceramic barrier all right okay okay I'm impressed but how big a bloke can this stuff really handle now remember I promised you something a little special don't kid yourself this hunting bow is no toy it'll produce uh somewhere the vicinity of 175 feet per second right um it's aluminum Arrow feather fletched and it has 125 grain bullet field tip in other words this is a serious weapon it could kill a bear at 20 pesos be careful the Ricochet first I want to see what it does to untreated Kevlar how far is it I think about six to eight inches yeah now let's see what happens to a vest impregnated with liquid armor I couldn't get through this well we do lots remember this is a steel-tipped hunting Arrow traveling at 170 feet a second [Music] all right our high-speed camera reveals something incredible the arrow bounces right off here it is on the floor not in there at all all right so probably what happens that tip of the arrow remember it's it's pointy it started to poke through but just couldn't find its way all the way through bounced off and came back in this case the shear thickening fluid is holding those fibers in place won't allow them to slide out of the way keeps the uh the arrow getting all the way through and Eric has other applications in mind for this amazing goo just imagine what treated gloves could mean for Rescue and health care workers no more needle sticks from Dirty syringes so for example police officers often when they search somebody they got to search their pockets even sanitation workers picking up garbage nobody wants to get stuck with needles there's a need for needle protective materials but getting lightweight stab proof uniforms into the prison system is still Eric's priority these guards risk lethal attack every day and liquid armor is life-saving technology there's always that threat if that threat exists and there's an item out there that can protect us absolutely as long as it's uh you know somewhat lightweight something you can move around in air travel used to be a soft target for terrorists and Smugglers but now we know better and we're spending billions of dollars on Airport security to keep a step ahead of the bad guys of course there are still vulnerabilities take the standard transmission x-ray machine used to screen for weapons and catch metal objects but that's about it now live in a world of liquid explosives and ceramic weapons obscure designer drugs and human smuggling problem with these new threads is that their chemical structure isn't even vaguely metallic it's organic and that means they're almost invisible to regular machines we need something new and now we've got it it's called the Backscatter the types of Technology at airport checkpoints now were originally deployed to help defeat hijacking threats when people would try to get on board planes with guns or knives and commandeer them and take them to other locations today the threat's much more sophisticated prove the power of this new technology let's compare it to traditional security and the typical carry-on briefcase with a regular x-ray machine we have some articles of clothing here in the top and here's some typical items power supply for a laptop computer a portable radio with a cassette player there's also an umbrella an electric toothbrush and a cell phone it's all typical all metallic and easily picked up by standard x-ray technology here's our umbrella down here 's our power supply for our laptop computer this image also reveals a handgun that was concealed from the bag and so again this image is very good at finding kind of dense objects that may be concealed in this bag such as that handgun but there's so much more hidden inside the suitcase dangerous things that aren't made from metal now check out what the new Backscatter reveals there are three organic threats here the first easy to pick out is a composite handgun that's designed specifically to be hard or impossible to detect in a transmission x-ray image in addition to that we have this organic item which is an explosive and the explosive stimulant is concealed by the cell phone you can see the outline of the cell phones the same as we showed in the transmission image finally there's a bottle here which contains liquid explosive components this item is concealed in our transmission x-ray by our laptop power supply cord pretty amazing so what's going on here the new technology still uses x-rays it's just how it reads them that makes the difference normal machines simply capture straight x-rays either passing through or being blocked by objects [Music] the Backscatter looks at x-rays that are diffracted or scattered off in different directions these scattered Rays hold a lot of information because different materials scatter photons in different ways organic elements like hydrogen oxygen and carbon can be identified by their unique scatter pattern and with some computer analysis the pattern turns into an image showing up as clearly as metal used on a grand scale ports are another soft target that Backscatter technology hopes to toughen up shipping containers can be Trojan horses for weapons Contraband even human trafficking but this Z portal is the airport system on steroids you can run whole containers trucks or vehicles through it in just 30 seconds it can scan a car from three different angles see the images start to reveal on the screen and we've got a top down View and a passenger side view of the vehicle as well as a right side view of the vehicle with Backscatter technology there are no secrets so for example in our top-down view you can see there's actually a stowaway that's concealed in the trunk of this vehicle you can also see all the way through the roof of the vehicle down through the back seat of the vehicle here and you can see there are items that have been concealed underneath the seat you can also see threats that have been concealed on the side of the vehicle here here's another simulant for cigarettes this machine is a big Improvement in technology technology is catching up with the bad guys and giving us some pretty cool security detecting deadly threats capturing the right person every time and protecting our protectors I'm going Lefty see you next time on cool stuff foreign [Music] foreign
2023-11-08 14:07
