Name That Powder

By Jeremy Caplan

It still happens in mail rooms and airports: a suspicious unidentified substance turns up, and activity freezes for hours until a haz-mat team can make a safety assessment. But Ahura Corp.'s FirstDefender--a handheld instrument that recognizes thousands of chemicals--can give cops and firefighters an immediate analysis of just about any substance.

FirstDefender uses lasers and a type of optical analysis known as Raman spectroscopy. "It shines a light on an object and looks at the scattered light coming back, which carries the optical signature of the material, whether it's a liquid or a solid," explains Ahura founder and president Daryoosh Vakhshoori. "You can read the substance as if it had a bar code, observing if the white powder you see is sugar, aspirin or something more dangerous."

In its current form, FirstDefender is a portable, 4-lb. box that costs about $30,000, which means you won't find it in every cop car quite yet. But Ahura plans to slim the device to the size of a cell phone and reduce its cost with advances in technology to make it a more practical everyday tool for emergency responders.

FirstDefenders have already been used in the post-Katrina cleanup to identify sludge and in law-enforcement and terrorism investigations. They have even shown up on the television show CSI. The instrument could also soon test for counterfeit pharmaceuticals that might otherwise be hard to detect. "It's another eye you can use to see the material around you," says Vakhshoori, "like Superman looking right through a wall."