BOMBERS and bomb makers could soon be exposed by testing their hair for traces of explosives.
Jimmie Oxley, a chemist at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, has extracted nanograms of the common explosives TNT, RDX and PETN from the hair of workers who handle these chemicals daily when training airport sniffer dogs. Even after several washes and brushing, the explosives still showed up in chromatography tests on a solvent-soaked comb that was run through the hair.
Oxley does not fully understand how the explosives bind to hair, but because her experiments showed that explosives bind more readily to dark…
