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If Los Alamos National Laboratory were to endorse its latest law enforcement gadget with an infomercial, a booming voice might shout out the following:

"It scans, swipes, tracks GPS locations, sends data, takes pictures and even has an LED flashlight attachment."

The device - designed for sampling crime scenes - could easily take the title of "Swiss Army Gun," although the Swiss Army Brands Inc. might have a problem with that, said Michael Erickson, a business development officer at the lab.

"You could call it that, I suppose. It really is an ingenious device," Erickson said. "You can collect, record, track samples and do many other things quickly and reliably with it."

The gadget - which weighs less than a pound and looks a bit like a nail gun - doesn't have a bottle opener or a pair of scissors attached, but it has pretty much everything else a crime scene investigator needs to take samples, prevent contamination and preserve the chain of evidence, said Erickson and Torsten Staab, the lab scientist who invented it.

"We wanted to find a way to avoid contaminating samples in the field, while speeding up the collection process," Staab said. "Most of the information taken in the field now is done by two people - one who samples and one who manually logs things in. This is much faster."

Sample collection - such as swabbing surfaces to find certain chemicals or biological weapons - can be a lengthy process. Investigators manually collect substances, write down details about location and time, and then transcribe them into a computer later in the day.

The gadget puts all those steps into one package, and reduces sample collection to a process that only takes a minute or two, Staab said.

Staab came up with the idea for the device about three and a half years ago, after working with an industrial hygienist at Los Alamos and wondering if there was a way to simplify the sampling process, he said.

"We also wanted to prevent possible hazards to the collector," Staab said. "So we made an adaptor so you don't have to touch the sample at all. The gun ejects a filter disk which you can put right into a sample bag without using your hands."

The gun also has a wireless network card so encrypted crime scene data can be sent wirelessly back to a computer - without the need to transcribe information by hand.

"If, say, somebody from the FBI collected a sample at a person's house, they can create a complete chain of custody," Staab said. "You can take photos of the evidence, scan bar codes, record voice samples and also take environmental information like temperature and distance."

And because all the information is instantly transferred to a computer, the chain of custody is constantly tracked - making it less open to scrutiny, Staab said.

Staab received $75,000 from the Center for Commercialization of Advanced Technology - a Department of Defense program - three years ago to create a prototype.

A team of five Los Alamos employees worked with Staab to develop it, and CCAT spent an additional $7,000 for two more prototype devices in January, which are now complete, Staab said.

Hazardous materials teams at the lab tested the device during the past year and were happy with it, Staab said.

By the end of the year, Los Alamos hopes to find a commercial partner to mass-produce and market the gun, Erickson said.

"We've identified probably around 100 companies that we think would have an interest," Erickson said. "And for as high tech a gadget as this is, it's actually a relatively low-cost item."

The price should be somewhere around $1,500 each - which is affordable for most law enforcement agencies, he said.

And unlike a lot of lab-developed technology, the gun is fully finished and ready to go, Staab said.

"We can just easily hand it out to a company and they can produce it," Staab said. "It should be ready commercially perhaps next year."