Jess Wisse (JW): What's behind the science and inventions that impact our daily lives? Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Pods of Science are the stories of what happens before the breakthrough. Before a technology becomes a house-hold name, before the life-saving drug his pharmacy shelves, before the paper's published - see what happens when great minds meet great challenges.

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Welcome. I’m your host, Jess Wisse. On today’s episode we’ll talking about new technology that may give dogs a run for their money. Wondering what we’re talking about? Stay tuned to learn more.

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JW: Floppy-eared sniffer dogs made the news earlier this year as the latest change to security procedures in airports. But in the not-too-distant future, they could be replaced. The replacement is a technology that doesn’t require a scratch behind the ear and a treat to its job.

Meet the man behind the tech: Robert Ewing.

Robert Ewing (RE): I like discovering things. I like solving puzzles. I like doing things that I don't think are possible, or challenging. And learning.

JW: Robert Ewing is a scientist at PNNL. And he’s made a discovery that could potentially save lives.

RE: I'm Robert Ewing. I'm a research chemist at the Pacific Northwest National Lab. I've been here for about 13 years. I've studied various analytical techniques for detecting trace of stances explosives and drugs, or some of those compounds. Ionization chemistry as a part of that. The instrumentation that goes along with that. Those are some of the things that I do for fun.

JW: So, what did Robert discover?

He and his team at PNNL developed a technology that’s ultrasensitive. It detects explosive vapors, deadly chemicals, and drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl with unparalleled accuracy. And it works in seconds.

RE: The technology really stems from using the detector of a mass spectrometer. And that's a way to look at different molecules, to understand what mass is there. And from that you can sort of determine the analyte. Here you're looking at what we did, or one of the challenges, was is the ionization. So, for the mass spec to see a molecule you've got to put a charge on there so it can manipulate that charge, create an electric field, and separate it. And so the ionization process is a way of getting that charge, that electrical charge, onto an individual molecule. And that's really where I've spent a lot of my time—understanding the chemistry around how that ionization process works and how to improve upon it.

With the commercial mass specs that are out there that are pretty sensitive (parts per billion range and stuff) work pretty well. What we did is, we discovered that if you increase the amount of time that the ionization process can occur you can increase the sensitivity. And so the mass spec has a pinhole bringing the ions in from outside. What we do is, we took the ionization source and moved that away from the mass spec, and instead of having a few milliseconds of reaction time we give it two or three seconds and that gave us several orders of magnitude increase in sensitivity.

JW: This technology could be a game-changer for transportation hubs, mail facilities, and other safety and security screening applications, like the ones you see in airports.

Thanks to Robert’s tireless efforts, the system can detect a whole slew of things. Including explosive vapors, like TNT, toxic chemicals similar to nerve agents, and even illicit drugs, like fentanyl, methamphetamine, and cocaine.

The most surprising part? Robert thought this was a problem that was un-solvable. But he kept mulling on the idea, and that got him to think about none other than man’s best friend.

RE: Probably one of the driving force—the ah-hah moments—I always thought that explosive vapor was a challenge that we probably wouldn't overcome. And yet, dogs go out and sniff explosives all the time. Well, I've always wondered what dogs really smell? You know, are they smelling the explosive? A