Hold on to your bottled water: a machine originally designed to check the quality of wine could soon lift the current restrictions on taking liquids aboard aeroplanes. In 2002 Matthew Augustine, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Davis, US patented a device to determine whether wine had spoiled without opening the bottle. It works in a similar way to the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners used in hospitals, combining a pulse of radio waves and a strong magnetic field to determine the chemical structure of the wine. Augustine first turned his device to liquid explosives after a failed terror plot in 2006, which lead to a ban on taking large quantities of liquids on flights. He found that the technique could tell the difference between dangerous substances such as petrol and more innocuous liquids like toothpaste.