NEW CAMERA SEES THROUGH CLOTHES
The camera will be deployed in railway stations, shopping centers and other public spaces
 - The spaceage camera  developed to see through interstellar dust is now being considered for airports, stadiums and crowd control. The device can see through clothing up to 80 feet away The camera's ability to strip search crowds of people from a distance has instantly drawn serious interest from security officials across the country, both law enforcement and military -
The image comes up on a computer monitor in real time. It is formed not like x-rays are, by bombarding bodies with radiation, but by reading natural waves coming off the human body, so it's completely harmless. The newest  version is on the market already, and the technology is proven. The U.S. military has already expressed interest, and it is likely the device will appear in the United States soon. It has been developed by ThruVision, an Oxfordshire based company spun out from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, one of the British government's leading physics research centers. It was designed for use in spacecraft and astronomy but researchers soon realized that cameras capable of seeing through clouds of cosmic dust could also see through clothing. The technology works by detecting and measuring terahertz waves, or T-waves for short. These are a form of electromagnetic radiation, emitted by all people and objects that lie between the infrared and microwave parts of the spectrum. In the near future, terahertz remote sensing, detectors could see through walls, clothing and packaging materials and immediately identify the unique terahertz waves of the materials contained inside. Someone may soon be able to tell what types material are in your pockets from tens, and possibly thousands, of feet away. Until now, detecting terahertz waves, the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum between infrared and microwave light, hasn’t been possible from distances more than inches because the waves are absorbed by ambient moisture in the air, killing the signal.
“A lot of other researchers thought that terahertz remote sensing was mission impossible,” said physicist Jingle Liu of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, lead author of the study published July 11 in Nature Photonics. Liu’s team solved the problem by not relying on the terahertz waves themselves to generate or carry the signal back to the detector. Instead, they used the reflection created by lasers pointed at the target. Bill Foster, the president of Thermal Matrix, an American defense contractor specializing in imaging systems for the U.S. military, is one customer. He said: "This could be deployed at major sporting events, concerts and rail stations as well as for military use." “Homeland security and law enforcement have been struggling for years to get technology like this,” said terahertz expert Abul Azad at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “I think the approach they have revealed is really, really unique.”
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