Technology is no better than good old-fashioned detective work at preventing suicide-bomb attacks, says a new study.
Newly developed terahertz scanners and sensitive sensors can detect explosives carried by would-be bombers. However, even if the technology were affordable and reliable, and could be widely deployed in urban areas, it still would not save many lives, says Edward Kaplan at Yale University.
Kaplan and Moshe Kress at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, mathematically modelled how many sensors would be needed to warn that a suicide bomber was walking through either an open plaza or a grid of city streets.…
