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Now that nobody wants to fly anyway, TSA has decided that large bottles of fluids and gels aren’t all that dangerous after all:

The Transportation Security Administration will allow travelers to bring larger bottles of hand sanitizer on board with them when they fly, the agency announced Friday — the latest in a series of policy changes tied to the novel coronavirus outbreak. Passengers will now be allowed to travel with containers of liquid hand sanitizer up to 12 ounces.

But wait. If terrorists can make a bomb out of fluids and gels, they can just as readily make it from fluids and gels packed into a bottle marked “Purell.” So if it’s OK to carry 12 ounces of Purell on board a plane, why not 12 ounces of anything else? Does this make sense? Our resident chemist, Cheryl Rofer, explains:

To wrap a bit of context around this, the fear of liquids was based on the idea that terrorists could do a chemical synthesis, complete with filtering a solid from a liquid, in the airplane restrooms, which was always absurd. https://t.co/ANvLzaQpbb — Cheryl Rofer (@CherylRofer) March 17, 2020

Oh.