With a little ingenuity, mass spectrometry technology has been teamed up with a surgical knife and proprietary software to find fraudulent food and/or beverages.
Sometimes, ingenious devices come about when seemingly disparate technologies are combined to create a new technology or instrument. Take, for example, the mass spectrometer—not a new technology, but capable of measuring all the chemical constituents of a material, though usually not without a lot of sample preparation.
The technology referred to as rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry (REIMS™) was developed by Zoltán Takáts, professor of analytical chemistry at Imperial College London and co-founder of Medimass Ltd. REIMS technology uses an electrosurgical handpiece to generate an aerosol that is transferred to a mass spectrometer for ionization and analysis.