A federal agency is highlighting how a technique that was created to capture specific compounds from air samples for analysis to help detect bombs after 9/11 is now being used to aid in the development of a marijuana breathalyzer to identify impaired drivers.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cited the cannabis technology effort as part of a new post on how scientific discoveries often have unexpected applications.
“Painter Bob Ross taught us that ‘happy accidents’ can make for beautiful art,” the agency said. “Happy accidents also happen in science, when experiments take research in unexpected directions. Probably the most dramatic example is Sir Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin.”
The post, which was published as part of National Forensic Science Week, notes how law enforcement agencies began relying on dogs to help sniff out bombs after the 2001 terrorist attacks but that explosive compounds evolve faster than the animals can be trained to learn their scents. As a result, researcher Tara Lovestead, who now works at NIST, developed a method called the “headspace technique” that separates compounds from air samples in the hopes it could be used as part of an electronic device to do the work of bomb-sniffing
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