Not being a bedtime reader of the magazine Superconductor Science and Technology, I would have missed a story completely without the BBC catching it and running the story about Hilbert spectroscopy. Without being scientific, let me summarise the jist of the piece.

Using cheap and light materials, this system enables a range of liquids to be identified in about one fifth of a second. This means that those liquids we carry on planes in little plastic bags can be analysed so quickly that we could carry larger volumes with us because it seems the volume of liquid we carry doesn’t slow the ability of the system to work out what the liquid is. So not carrying liquids on flights could be coming to an end. That’s the good news.

The not so good news is that the scientists who have developed this in Germany have yet to get the system into commercial use so it could be a while before it becomes available. But they believe it could be integrated with some fairly easily available existing kit.

Given that these days the security queues at airports are often longer than the check-in ones, you would hope that equipment manufacturers and airports would be beating a path to the scientists so that we could get suitable equipment into airports as soon as possible.