Can Science Beat Counterfeit Detector Pens? 

I tried googling the brand of amylase you used, and (assuming I found the actual brand) it appears that it's temperature optimum is in the range of 52-62 °C, which means that at the temperature you used, it probably got signifcantly denatured after just a few minutes. The pH should also be considered. They just say "appropriate for use at temperature and pH conditions typical for fermentation", which makes sense considering most amylases have their optima at a pH of around 4-5. So maybe try using a buffer. As for the yeast, I don't know your exact conditions, but the amylase enyme is probably inducible, which (if true) would mean it won't be produced unless starch is the only nutrient source available in the solution, so making it work with your setup would probbably be difficult as adding starch to induce the production of amylase would probbably just add more starch to the bill. Assuming it really is starch causing the reaction, which does seem very plausible, consider trying the enzymatic reaction with amylase over night or over two nights (with an eventual addition of more enzyme after the first night to compensate for protein denaturation) at room temperature, then washing the bill in some water (a 1 hour soak should probbably suffice), and after drying trying out the pen. Or you can try 60 °C over a few hours. 2-4 hours would probably work wonders. Great video idea btw!

Long enough to break down the paper perhaps?

I'd taste the water to see if it was getting sweeter. 😋

Two layers of phonebook paper beat the pen and hand feel. This is well known.

You need to use a couple other enzymes to break down the starch to simple sugars. Next treat the paper with sodium sulfite. The sulfite reacts with the iodine converting it to iodate which is colorless.

You pay your boss? You have a strange job 😄

very bad. Worse would be to launder all the companies bills with starch. But we gotta do our part to keep our money clean!

Here to help 😅

What I learned? Most potato chips in the store are actually counterfeit.

There are actually security features in modern banknotes to guard against that. They’re embedded into the paper itself during manufacture, so sorry. You’re SOL.

You can use laser ablation to bleach them, stick to the older bills with the out the extra strip.

@@kyleeames8229So use old bills. Thanks homie.

Good to know!

The craziest business model- where your customers give your product back, and it's a good thing.

Thanks for that!

The RCMP say that they haven’t seen a single convincing counterfeit since the introduction of the new bills. Kind of impressive really.

It's also an accessibility nightmare for people with impaired vision. You have to trust other people to not steal from you if you need help counting for your purchase. Size and color differences would solve this as it has in many countries.

Euro bills are so chock full of security measures. It is both silly and impressive! Apparently they're based on the last two generations of Dutch paper money which were made by a very clever artist, and which were the first bills to not have faces of people on them. He also, as part joke, part easy-to-identify, adopted the monopoly money colours for them.

Canadian money doesn't have different sizes for the different bills, but the bills are full of non-printed elements that are unique to each denomination, usually including the number of the denomination. 3 easy to see ones include the braille dots, the embedded metallic strips in the line window with the denomination digits punched out, and the diffraction grating in the maple leaf window of 20$+ bills. That last one is super neat, looking at a bright dot light through that window will show the denomination repeated 3 times in a circle around the light, and even works with a laser beam

@@debug9424 Got to love Science, right? :D

And of course no one will ever be suspicious of paper money that looks like it's been varnished or even laminated, perfect! ;-)

@@athompso99 It's a collector's bill, I keep it there for safety and now times are hard...

One of the largest counterfeiters in US history used a light coating of a particular brand of hairspray…

This is wild!

What about the security strip or the textured collar or literally any of the other anti-counterfeit measures?

That's diabolical and really clever. Sounds like a great story!

You mean like this: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xDaVCyOBSsY.htmlfeature=shared&t=387

Only for show 🤦‍♂️

don't*

And are much more expensive.

@@metamorphicorder Apparently polymer banknotes also last several times longer than paper notes, so the initial printing cost is offset by not having to print new banknotes quite so often. Which also another reason why some countries (EG: UK, Australia and New Zealand) issue $1 and $2 (or, £1 and £2) coins instead of banknotes, as they will last for decades in circulation, rather than the just a couple of years for paper notes.

@dj1NM3 Coins are much easier to fake though, no one checks the security features for coins. At one point the estimated number of fake £2 coins exceded legit £2 coins. It's in part why the UK has reduced supply of £2 coins and abandoned their plans for a £5 coin. The forgeries are just too hard to stop. Coins lasting forever makes them great for low values that aren't worth forging, but coins just don't get the scruitiny that notes do.

It does doesn't it ?

Right, I thought the light was from electrons absorbing photons, thereby getting bumped up an energy level, and then settling back down, releasing photons of a specific wavelength in the process. The light doesn't actually interact with the nucleus in any meaningful way, right? I'm not a physicist, so idk...

It kinda does : the wavelength of light is orders of magnitude above the size of an atom. The electromagnetic field that describe light is thus almost uniform at this scale. Besides, the nucleus is about five or four orders of magnitudes smaller than the electron cloud, electrons don't really have a radius, they certainly don't have a definite position at this scale. This is a rough representation that seize one basic aspect of the atomic structure : its composition. It is not meant to be perfectly accurate.

When she said her oven was set to 425, my only thought was, oh cool, roughly 5% (actually just over 6%) overshoot from the oven and she has potential ignition. Hopefully her oven is calibrated and reliable and the duty cycling over shooting to average it out doesn't just catch it on fire anyway. Very glad it didn't work, would be a slight problem if there was an uptick in would be counterfeiters burning down their kitchens.

Uhm, actually, it is "Fahrenheit 451".

Fair enough, it's been a while since i read it and remembered the title backwards. @@der.Schtefan

​@@straphyrI wonder how long she put it in, I'm surprised it didn't change color from starting to burn

Hello.

'Till you run in to that one cashier who's mom uses laundry starch on their clothes 🙇🏻😂

Given enough exposure time, the ignition temperature for paper and wood can drop to 230° F, due to pyrolyzation.

And we’re super glad to have her!

I am pretty sure that is showing how some of the light's energy is absorbed by the atom making the wavelength change, and making the light you see when it hits your eye appear a different colour. The colours in the animation represent the colour of the light itself if it hit your retina at that point in its path, so it only changes colour after hitting the particle as that is the event that causes some light to be absorbed. The transition in the animation to purple is then just demonstrating that if it was, for example, an ion, the difference in charge would lead to more or less light being absorbed and a different colour being reflected.

I don’t know if you win or lose with this comment. 😂

Yes, they're used in Europe, too. I don't know which country you're from exactly, so it might depend on local customs, but I've seen gas stations clerks check 20 or 50 euro banknotes with one of these. But euro notes are actually signficantly safer and more difficult to counterfeit than US dollars. They're not all the same size, so you can't bleach lower denominations and reprint them, they have various watermarks, holograms, fine prints and various other security measures not found on dollar bills. The euro when it came out was already safer than the dollar, and that has only become more true with the new editions. Dollar bills have basically not changed since their inception.

@@rfldss89 I'm from Italy and I've never seen that. I have seen a lot of UV lamps and automated machines that check notes.

Over the last decade quite a few additional security features have been added to US currency, but would take a magnifying glass and time to check them (micro engraving and such like.) In Northern Ireland in the late 90s the UV lamps were useless as they simply used certain sunscreens in notes, back then there was no glow under a UV lamp. So fluorescing sections had to be added. TBH intaglio printing is seldom present on counterfeit notes and is usually why people think the note feels wrong. I do wonder if the North Korean 'super dollars' have the micro printing yet

In the US we prefer it to be hard for blind people to tell the difference between them and for it to be easy to take small money make big bill. Idk why, it just still works that way

Idk man last time I gave someone a counterfeit 5 to spend they almost got arrested