Security control is becoming a major global issue in strategic locations, such as airports, official buildings, and transit stations. The agencies responsible for public security need powerful and sensitive tools to detect warfare agents and explosives. Volatile signature detection is one of the fastest and easiest ways to achieve this task. However, explosive chemicals have low volatility maki...

BACKGROUND Automated standoff detection and classification of explosives based on their characteristic vapours would be highly desirable. Biologically derived odorant receptors have potential as the explosive recognition element in novel biosensors. Caenorhabditis elegans' genome contains over 1,000 uncharacterised candidate chemosensory receptors. It was not known whether any of these respond ...

Explosives contamination in surface or groundwater used for the irrigation of food crops and phytoremediation of explosives-contaminated soil or water using plant-assisted biodegradation have brought about concerns as to the fate of explosives in plants. Liquid scintillation counting, high-performance liquid chromatography, and gel permeation chromatography were utilized to characterize explosi...

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is a well-established analytical separation technique. Owing to its high versatility, major advancements have been made with regard to the instrumental set-ups during the last years. New strategies have been proposed to develop high-sensitive methods, portable CE or miniaturized devices. These techniques are of great interest in the analysis of explosives, which g...

Despite the recent surge in the publication of novel instrumental sensors for explosives detection, canines are still widely regarded as one of the most effective real-time field method of explosives detection. In the work presented, headspace analysis is performed by solid phase microextraction (SPME)/gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), and gas chromatography-electron capture detecti...

Unexploded explosives that include royal demolition explosive (RDX) and trinitrotoluene (TNT) cause environmental concerns for surrounding ecosystems. Baccharis halimifolia is a plant species in the sunflower family that grows naturally near munitions sites on contaminated soils, indicating that it might have tolerance to explosives. B. halimifolia plants were grown on 100, 300, and 750 mg kg(-...

Primary explosives are used in small quantities to generate a detonation wave when subjected to a flame, heat, impact, electric spark, or friction. Detonation of the primary explosive initiates the secondary booster or main-charge explosive or propellant. Long-term use of lead azide and lead styphnate as primary explosives has resulted in lead contamination at artillery and firing ranges and be...