Polymers are widely used in industry and increasingly deployed as replacements for metals in the manufacture of automobile parts, firearms and other products. Such parts are marked with serial numbers for security and traceability purposes. The numbers may, however, be partially or completely erased, and although there are techniques for recovering them from metal parts, this is not the case for polymers. Now, in an article published in Analytical Chemistry, researchers have demonstrated the potential of a non-destructive method for making abraded serial numbers on polymers visible again.