SOUTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. (AP) – In cluttered labs in the University of Rhode Island’s chemistry department, Jimmie Oxley and her students are lighting fires, mixing chemicals, and trying to see what they can and can’t blow up.

And the government not only knows about it – its paying them to do it.

In an effort to stay one step ahead of would-be terrorist bombers, the federal government awarded the university a grant to study better ways to sniff out traces of an explosive substance, protect household chemicals from being converted into bombs and strengthen buildings to lessen the devastation of an exploding bomb.

“In some cases I think there are some chemicals that could be used that nobody’s thought about yet,” said Oxley, a chemistry professor who has been a visiting scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1987. “We need to be thinking ahead of the terrorists.”

The new initiative, called the Center of Excellence for Explosives Detection, Mitigation and Response, is intended to equip federal investigators with additional tools to thwart would-be terrorist bombers, both within and without America’s borders.

Oxley and scientists at Northeastern University in Boston, which is co-directing the new center, have received $5.15 million from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to run experiments in three main areas of research: making blasts less damaging by upgrading building materials, taking the bite out of common, commercial ingredients that people use to make bombs at home, and improving ways to detect homemade bombs and bomb-makers.

“Improving instruments at airports (is something) that most people will think of,” Oxley said. “But there’s lots of different ways to go about that.”

Take, for instance, vapors and particle detection.

“You can walk into a room and say somebody’s been smoking. You’re doing that based on an odor that’s left behind,” Oxley said.

“But you can also do it based on particles. If it’s a smoker’s office, you can bet you’re going to have yellow stuff on the desk. So there’s the particle detection,” she added.

The center is one of 12 across the country, each with its own specialty, that the federal government has funded to tackle ways to keep Americans and their foods, ports, transportation, soldiers and borders safe.

The centers this year received a combined $36.7 million, said Matthew Clark, director of DHS’s office of university programs. Scientists from around the globe, from both the private and public sector, collaborate on projects through the centers, he said.

“They’re trying to address these very difficult problems that no one academic discipline can address,” Clark said.

The center is expecting that 21 graduate students and professors at participating universities will work on developing new gadgets and methods for tracking terrorists by the chemicals they leave behind as they build, transport and detonate bombs.

Oxley is building on her two decades of expertise in explosives. In the past, she and her students have blown up a pipe bomb to map out how the bombs fragment.

While standard military explosives are fairly well understood, Oxley said, researchers are still learning about homemade devices.

“We need to characterize them if people are going to work with them or if we are going to prevent people from making explosives out of common precursors,” Oxley said.

One example is hydrogen peroxide, which bubbles when used to clean the edges of wounds. But more nefariously, shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to use hydrogen peroxide to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami in 2001.

And three men were convicted in London this September of conspiracy to murder for plotting to blow up commercial jetliners with hydrogen peroxide bombs disguised as soft drinks.

But because hydrogen peroxide, urea and other common products are helpful to most people and harmful in the hands of a few, pulling them off shelves altogether isn’t a desirable option.

“They’re out there in the common commerce because they’re needed in common commerce,” she said. “We have to evaluate their need in society versus their risk, and some of them we absolutely cannot do without. So we’ll have to see what we can do about it.”

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