When going through the airport security you can notice who is an experienced traveler and who it getting on his first flight since 9/11. As an experienced traveler, I do everything possible to go through the security checkpoint as quick as possible:
- Emptying my pockets in advance (cell, wallet, BlackBerry, etc) and putting everything in my laptop bag.
- Having the liquids bag ready outside my carry-on
- Shoes with no shoelaces
- etc.
This Thursday I flew back from Cleveland to Raleigh, and when I got in line to go through security I started the regular ritual that you would do without thinking already: Take out your laptop, shoes, etc. When the TSA agent saw me do that he told me "Sir, you don't have to take your laptop out", and my first reaction was to look at my boarding pass to see if I was "randomly selected..." by checking if I have SSSS on my boarding pass which I didn't. I asked the agent what does it mean I don't need to take out the laptop, and he said that is not required in this machine. So I asked, what about the liquids? And he kindly answered just leave everything in your carry-on. 
It turns out that TSA purchased 20 new machines to test them in different airports. Each of these machines cost around $400,000 and is supposed to close the biggest security hole that screeners have to manually find bombs, guns and knives using the simple X-ray machines available today.
These new machines are much bigger than the regular ones and manufactured by Analogic which has been using X-Ray technology for medical purposes in the past. These machines create an X-Ray 3D picture of the bags and allow the TSA agent to turn the object and also "slice" them to see through them and this is why it doesn't require to take anything out of the bags.
Hopefully they'll roll these quickly to the rest of the airports and the agents will get used to them since right now it seems like they are still learning and it takes them a couple of minutes to look at each bag through this machine.
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