The battle against counterfeiting has received a new weapon in the form of an ink inspired by a beetle.
This new ink is designed to be resistant to light and difficult to copy, solving several issues found in previous inks designed to combat the creation of fake money, according to Fox News. The U.S. government had previously used color-changing ink on $100, $50 and $20 bills to stop coounterfeiting, but that project proved to be expensive and not as effected as hoped.
Zhongze Gu, Zhuoying Xie, Chunwei Yuan and other researchers at China's Southeast University aim to avoid repeating history, making the new ink resistant to bleach and able to be applied quickly to hard and flexible surfaces with an inkjet printer. Particles known as colloidal photonic crystals (CPCs) are used to give the ink the ability, when exposed to ethanol vapors, to change colors.
The beetle that inspired the creation of this ink is the Tmesisternus isabellae, a species of longhorn beetle that can change its color from gold to red based on humidity levels, Fox News reported. Beetles' colors change when the insect is exposed to water vapor.
"The complicated and reversible multicolor shifts of mesoporous CPC patterns are favorable for immediate recognition by naked eyes but hard to copy," the research team wrote.
There are other factors that remain significant when tracing fake money, with former secret service agent Kevin Billings pointing to security features playing a role.
"The new bills also have a magnetic strip, facial watermark, and the magnetic raised intaglio printing. All of these security components should be checked before you can safely determine the bill to be genuine," Billings said, adding that the bond paper U.S. currency is printed on can't be bought on the open market.
The research team believes their ink can be used for more than counterfeiting technology, such as "multifunctional microchips, sensor arrays, or dynamic displays."
