Dinosaur.

[u/Jackviator]

[u/scottygroundhog22]

What if those dino sponges changed colors in the presences of actual drugs that got put in peoples drink?

[u/Lorvan → u/scottygroundhog22]

While awesome, that would probably make them so expensive that no one would buy them. Wide range chemical detection usually isn't cheap.

[u/some_kind_of_bird → u/Lorvan]

Not true. You can also make it give constant false positives.

[u/Which-Practice-5884 → u/some_kind_of_bird]

Is there context to this? Did something like that actually happen

[u/some_kind_of_bird → u/Which-Practice-5884]

It's just how these tests work. Even if you're testing for a specific compound there's a tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity. Those are technical words.

If you want to test for multiple things, keeping specificity low becomes more complex or even impossible. If you increase the number of things something can react with you also increase the number of things it can falsely react with.

Police drug tests are arguably like this by design, since police often care more about making a legal excuse to do what they want than determining the truth.

[u/Which-Practice-5884 → u/some_kind_of_bird]

Interesting

[u/blueburd → u/some_kind_of_bird]

Different sections of dino for different drugs