Smart Water.

[fool]

Smart water

Anyone know anything about how this stuff works?

I was just talking to my mum, who had spent the day giving a presentation to a bunch of local school science heads and she told me that the speaker following her was a policeman asking all the schools to buy some smart water and demonstrate it in science classes.
You paint the stuff on to whatever, and, once its dry, it not only glows under UV light, but there's an id code embeded in there.

 

[jtr1962]

If I had to guess I would say they found some way of putting a bar code on the water molecules. Under a scanning electron microscope(the kind that enables you to see atoms) this bar code would be clearly visible. Other than that I don't see how you would be able to distinguish water molecules from each other.

 

[Howell]

Looks like it's additional non-water inert molecules in the water. I can't think of any other way to confound someone reverse engineering a liquid based product and yet not able to be extracted from the liquid.
http://www.smartwater.com/products/f_signature.html

fool, what does a policeman care about 'smart water'? Did he speak of some law enforcement application?

 

[Prof.Wizard]

This is totally amazing. My only concern is if it lasts a fair amount of time exposed to the elements.

 

[fool]

Howell, the idea is that you paint this stuff on whatever really don't want to get stolen, and then, if the item in question is stolen and then recovered, the police, having access to the database(mentioned below) can tell that its definitely your property. Also, and especially if smart waters existence/use is widely known, the fact that any item that might be stolen is unequivocally positively identifiable will deter a lot of opportunistic crimes
The copper doing the presentation did tell about one particular instance in Liverpool where the property owners had received a tip of that they were going to get robbed. So the rigged the entrances to the building to spray this stuff over anyone who came in when they shouldn’t. So, the building gets robbed, a bunch of stuff gets stolen and no one knows who did it. Until a couple of weeks later when an off duty plod is in a night-club and sees this bloke whose watch, forearms, shoes, neck and face are glowing green under the clubs UV lights. The policeman realises that’s smart water glowing on the bloke, calls the station, and a short time latter the thief is arrested and all the stolen property recovered.

JTR, I doubt that the company modifies the water molecules, because even if they had worked out how to do so, it would be horribly expensive for all the police forces in the country to buy a scanning electron microscope that would only get used for this one application. Thinking about it some more since I made the post above, I reckon that this “smart water” should, more properly be called smart paint. What I think they’ve done is find a number of water soluble UV sensitive pigments with different emission spectra. Then by adding these pigments in different quantities for each customer, and recording the resultant composite emission spectrum in a database (mentioned above), the police should then be able to determine who something belongs to with a UV light and some kind of spectrum analyser. Or would that end up being as expensive as the scanning electron microscope?

Prof. Wizard, I don’t know how durable it is, except to say that the thief I mentioned above was caught weeks after the crime, and one can only assume that he must have washed at least once in that time frame. Other than that, I guess you’ll have to email the company. (who knows, maybe you’ll become their Italian distributor).

 

[jtr1962]

JTR, I doubt that the company modifies the water molecules, because even if they had worked out how to do so, it would be horribly expensive for all the police forces in the country to buy a scanning electron microscope that would only get used for this one application. Thinking about it some more since I made the post above, I reckon that this “smart water” should, more properly be called smart paint. What I think they’ve done is find a number of water soluble UV sensitive pigments with different emission spectra. Then by adding these pigments in different quantities for each customer, and recording the resultant composite emission spectrum in a database (mentioned above), the police should then be able to determine who something belongs to with a UV light and some kind of spectrum analyser.

I downloaded and listened to one of the movies after I made that post so I think you're right about how it works(sorry, I guess I've watched too much Star Trek). I would imagine being water soluble it might be possible to remove it fairly easily, but it is evidently too time consuming to try to remove it all.

Or would that end up being as expensive as the scanning electron microscope?

I think a spectrum analyzer can be had for a few thousand dollars whereas a scanning electron microscope runs at least 6 figures( ) if not more.

 

[Howell]

My uncle was in the vending business. Chips, cookies, cokes. He noticed that one of the machines was losing cash and figured it was going home with the employee from cash collection.

So he spread this special powder on the bills in the machine. The thing about the powder is that it doesn't wash off. It takes a couple of weeks to wear off. This was right before Halloween and what goes better with Halloween than black-lights. I'm not sure the employee ever figured out why they were glowing.