I don't believe them. This is an insane claim. This claim is equivalent to saying that they've developed anti-gravity technology, or that they've developed a process whereby your entire kitchen magically cleans itself every night at 2:43am while you sleep. This is ridiculous.50 meters is insane for this technology. I don't see how this is even remotely possible: from 50 fucking meters, you're telling me this tiny little device is able to read the energy returned to it by this little laser -- there and back, which is 100 meters total -- with perfect accuracy, and then feed this data to a connected computing device so that the computer can analyze it and thereby determine what molecules are present? MAYBE. But actually successfully analyze the data? That's fucking preposterous.Let's talk about what happens to a beam of energy that travels 100 meters. It travels through air. There's a lot of fucking stuff in the air around us. Like, a fucking lot. And in order to detect a speck of an illegal substance in a person's pocket, for instance, this device would have to emit an energy beam at some wavelength that passes through the clothing but that also is reflected at least partially -- possible? Check, we can do that today; that's trivial.However, it also has to detect the "fingerprint" of energy returned to the device from the initial emitted beam -- is this part possible? Sure, that's trivial too, BUT... detecting it with any level of accuracy? That's hard. That's very, very hard. There's a ton of stuff in 100 meters of air. That's going to cause significant refraction.Now stay with me here, this is the part that REALLY makes me say they're full of shit: the refraction is what they're fucking measuring. The amount of distortion is what they're looking at. That's how mass spectrometry works, basically -- it measures the amount of distortion present. What they're claiming to measure is the amount of distortion present in a beam of energy that's returned to the device after traveling 100 meters.Okay, sure... maybe on paper it's theoretically possible for their detector to be so sensitive that it can detect the differences that will be present depending on what molecules it's bounced off of. Notice that they're calling this a "programmable" device. Notice that they mention hooking it up to a computer to feed it data.Here's what I think: somebody made a fucking stellar pitch to some government office who had too much money left in their budget. Now this is how the US government works (unfortunately): if you don't spend your entire budget, it gets decreased, because -- well -- you didn't fucking spend it and we're short of money, so apparently you don't need it. This has caused a massive industry to build up around government contracts, because none of them want their fucking budget decreased so they end up buying the best of a bunch of useless shit knowing they'll never use it (or that it's worthless even).So this department had extra money, and somebody said they had a device that was sensitive enough to do this. They failed to point out clearly that their device will not allow you to do what they claim. It will allow you to figure out how to do what they claim. Their device will feed data to a computer, which will be totally 100% fucking useless because nobody on Earth knows how to analyze the fucking rubbish data their super-sensitive device feeds them.But the department their contract is with will keep its budget. Reporters go insane because the company obviously talks it up in press reports. And voila, you have a totally useless, but "almost" working device (in the same way that I'm "almost" a newborn).By the way: existing mass spectrometry devices vaporize and ionize the material they analyze. So they've also apparently figured out a way to get around having to vaporize everyone their beam scans./end_rant