After reading about how Nigerians are diversifying away from email scams, it's heartening to know that science is once again to the rescue. Roger Highfield (telegraph.co.uk) writes:
A rare wine merchant has joined forces with nuclear scientists to develop a 21st-century tool for unmasking counterfeit vintage? wines.
The technique developed by French scientists for a British wine expert consists of zapping bottles with beams of charged ions generated by a particle accelerator.
The beams of protons are directed at the glass, not the wine, and the telltale spectrum of X rays that results from the bombardment can help scientists to distinguish how old the bottles are and, roughly, where they originate.
"We compare the suspect bottles with those that we know come from the chateaux," explained Dr Hervé Guégan, a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Bordeaux, where the university also took part in the studies.
The reason this is a powerful? check on authenticity is, he explains, because "the chemical composition of glass used to make bottles changed over time and was different from place to place,"
