Everyday Documents Protected with Infrared Technology-Special use of color toners protects tickets, coupons and other items against forgery.

For those who want to protect everyday documents such as tickets, deeds and licenses against forgery, there have not been a lot of effective or affordable options. Highly sophisticated security features, such as those used in currency and passports, are too expensive, not to mention complex, for regular use.

Recently released technology from Xerox Corp. of Norwalk, Conn., may provide the answer by allowing documents printed with everyday toners and on standard color digital printing equipment to be protected against forgery. It embeds patterns or text in regular paper that can be read only with infrared light.
The technology relies on certain optical characteristics of printing colorants — toners, inks, dyes —that enable two colorant mixtures to appear the same under normal light but different under infrared light, said Raja Bala, co-inventor of the technique and a principal scientist for the company. For example, in many color laser printers, the black toner is carbon-based, and thus absorbs infrared light, while the other colored toners — cyan, magenta and yellow — do not absorb infrared light.

It is thus possible to find two toner mixtures — one with a small amount of black and the other with a large amount of black — that are indistinguishable under normal light but very distinct under infrared light.

If the protected document is copied or altered, the encoded text will appear substantially distorted when placed under an infrared light source. Practically any infrared light source and sensor can be used to detect the embedded text.

The patented InfraRedMark technology is designed to work with ordinary materials and can be used on the company’s standard digital printing systems. It is available in the FreeFlow Variable Information Suite 6.0 software.

Xerox also has developed other anticounterfeiting technology within the past year, including text that is printed smaller than a 1 point size, that is visible as a gloss effect when the paper is tilted, that is revealed by ultraviolet light or that is visible when an overlay key is superimposed.

Chip Performs Blood 'Biopsy'

CHARLESTOWN, Mass., Dec. 19, 2007 -- A microchip-based device the size of a business card uses 80,000 posts smeared with an antibody "glue" to capture hard-to-find tumor cells in blood samples, providing new information about the cells to help monitor and guide future cancer treatments.

The device, called the CTC-chip, was developed by a team from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Biomicroelectromechanical Systems (BioMEMS) Resource Center and the MGH Cancer Center. It can isolate, count and analyze circulating tumor cells (CTCs) -- viable cells from solid tumors carried in the bloodstream at a level of one in a billion cells -- from a blood sample. Because of their rarity and fragility, it has previously not been possible to get information from CTCs that could help clinical decision-making.
“This use of nanofluidics to find such rare cells is revolutionary, the first application of this technology to a broad, clinically important problem,” said Daniel Haber, MD, director of the MGH Cancer Center and a co-author of the report in the Dec. 20 issue of Nature. “While much work remains to be done, this approach raises the possibility of rapidly and noninvasively monitoring tumor response to treatment, allowing changes if the treatment is not effective, and the potential of early detection screening in people at increased risk for cancer.”

The existence of CTCs has been known since the mid-19th century, but since they are so hard to find, it has not been possible to adequately investigate their biology and significance. Microchip-based technologies have the ability to accurately sense and sort specific types of cells, but have only been used with microliter-sized fluid samples, the amount of blood in a fingerprick. Since CTCs are so rare, detecting them in useful quantities requires analyzing samples that are 1000 to 10,000 times larger.

Laser Safety (Interlock) Shutter

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