Big Bucks

Counterfeit, or fake, money causes big problems for banks and other businesses — but hopefully not for much longer. A company in Japan has developed a machine that spots these illegal bills before they are spent.

To create the machine, workers first had to compare the characteristics of a real bill with one that was counterfeit. Because some of the characteristics were hard to see, the workers blew the bills up 400 times their original size. Then, they took alt the information they gathered and programmed it into their machine.

When officials suspect that a bill is fake, they place it into the machine. If the bill is fake, the machine alerts the officials.

Scholastic SuperScience