MRI for the airport

Los Alamos National Laboratory designed MagViz to help make the separate airport security screening of containers of liquids unnecessary. Using the same principles as traditional magnetic resonance imaging--but without the large, powerful magnet--MagViz forms a low-resolution MRI of the contents of a carry-on bag in about 60 seconds.

The device works by measuring relaxation times of protons exposed to magnetic fields. Because the energy of the fields is so much smaller than used by traditional MRI, the relaxation time is obtained with extremely sensitive magnetic-field detectors called superconducting quantum interference devices, or "squids," which are cooled to liquid-helium temperatures.