Honey, are you for real?

A laser device developed in the hopes of measuring carbon on Mars may soon be used here on Earth to root out counterfeit foods - and make sure that honey, olive oil and chocolate are what they claim. A cheap fake honey concocted from sugar would be unmasked simply by laser-scanning the carbon dioxide released from burning a few milligrams. Seven years ago, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory - RAL - in England embarked on a 'blue sky' space research project to develop a new laser technique for identifying isotopes in space. Today's equipment is large, bulky and stationary. Samples of, say, polluted soil must be collected in the field, put in a flask and brought to the lab for testing - clearly unsuitable for space testing. But the new laser 'isotope ratio-meter' from RAL Space could change that. Thanks to its small, lightweight, robust, highly accurate lasers, the device could be sent into space to look for trace amounts of gas in very small samples.