You may not have to worry about throwing your water bottle away at the airport because scientists have figured out a new type of detection technology that could give airports the tools they need to tell if a liquid is a threat or not.

The reason for the limited on-board liquid allotment is that its nearly impossible for airport security to tell the difference between liquids in bottles.

But Michelle Espey, a Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist and  MagRay project leader explains:
One of the challenges for the screening of liquids in an airport is that, while traditional X-ray based baggage scanners provide high throughput with good resolution of some threats, there is limited sensitivity and selectivity for liquid discrimination. While MRI can differentiate liquids, there are a certain class of explosives, those that are complex, homemade, or may have mixes of all kinds of stuff that are more challenging.
The team comobined the X-ray and MRI techniques to create phenomenal results. When a liquid is scanned, a 3D space shows security officials where this liquid falls in terms of proton content and density, which tells the scanner whether or not the liquid is safe to pass.

Hopefully, with enough testing, this means you can pack that travel shampoo bottle in your bag or some moisturizer perhaps. [Los Alamos National Laboratory]