For Amy Bruce, PhD student at the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science at the University of Dundee, who's studying the recovery of trace explosives, The fact that in some respects things haven't changed that much, particularly when it comes to the chemical compounds employed in IEDs, isn't cause for complacency.

We've been somewhat fortunate in a way in terms of explosives in that a lot of the recent developments and things tend to still be quite chemically similar compounds.

And therefore, a lot of the techniques are still applicable.

But there absolutely is always the risk that someone somewhere finds something totally novel.

And that is a challenge.

And it is something that can be difficult to address, particularly online.

With swabbing, for example, if your swab doesn't pick it up, you don't know that you're missing it.

you see as being the biggest challenges in this field that we need to address going forward?

Amy Bruce is a PhD student at the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science at the University of Dundee, researching the recovery of trace explosives.

So you're probably familiar with swabs.

DNA is the common one.

We do something really similar where we take generally a cotton swab and use that to go over a surface where we think there might be traces of explosives to try and recover that so that we can analyze and get that information.

Through kind of experience more than anything, we have a general idea of where we're most likely to find explosives.

Now, some of that is practically, you know, you want something that is close to where explosives have been present.

And there are surfaces that we know we're probably more likely to pick stuff up of.

In terms of swabbing and getting evidence of explosives, how does human skin or clothing shape up in all this? Do we know?

Amy Bruce is a PhD student at the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science at the University of Dundee, studying the recovery of trace explosives.

So there are what we would call degradation products.

So that's when the chemical has changed following that detonation.

And you will be looking for different chemical structures, often smaller.

You can think about it as the chemical itself fragmenting and forming these smaller bits and pieces.

And so that's one thing we can look for.

However, generally, detonations won't consume 100% of the explosive.

there in the type of things that people would be using as detonation materials?