Scotch Tape and X-Rays

[Bill]

NEW YORK – Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape.

It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers.

"We were very surprised," said Juan Escobar. "The power you could get from just peeling tape was enormous."

Escobar, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, reports the work with UCLA colleagues in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

He suggests that with some refinements, the process might be harnessed for making inexpensive X-ray machines for paramedics or for places where electricity is expensive or hard to get.

In the new work, a machine peeled ordinary Scotch tape off a roll in a vacuum chamber at about 1.2 inches per second. Rapid pulses of X-rays, each about a billionth of a second long, emerged from very close to where the tape was coming off the roll.

That's where electrons jumped from the roll to the sticky underside of the tape that was being pulled away, a journey of about two-thousandths of an inch, Escobar said. When those electrons struck the sticky side they slowed down, and that slowing made them emit X-rays.

So is this a health hazard for unsuspecting tape-peelers?

Escobar noted that no X-rays are produced in the presence of air. You need to work in a vacuum — not exactly an everyday situation.

complete article...http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081022/ap_ ... e_surprise

[Darthwing Teorist]

Red alert! If ever Bin Laden gets his hands on a shipment of Scotch tape and then builds a huge vacuum chamber, we're fucked.

[Dmitri]

Red alert! If ever Bin Laden gets his hands on a shipment of Scotch tape and then builds a huge vacuum chamber, we're fucked.

Well, then he'd still have to come up with a delivery system... Say, invent a large vacuum box with mirror walls that can be shrunk down to a small size, so that he could trap the X-rays in it and then condense them, increasing power-per-volume-unit while simultaneously reducing the size of the said delivery system. Then those little containers would be carried to destination and suddenly opened all together, unleashing the condensed and eager-to-kill X-rays all over the place. We are doomed indeed.


Man, that article looked like it was published by onion.com... Amazing stuff.

[Darth Rock&Roll]

don't be silly, Bin Laden is CGI.

[qiphlow]

don't be silly, Bin Laden is CGI.

i fucking knew it!

[Bär]

Bin Laden is America's Emmanuel Goldstein of 1984's "Two Minutes Hate" fame at this point. Too useful for the scaremongering of it to get rid of.

[kreese]

Remember the sparks coming from Wint-O-Green Lifesavers? Probably unrelated, but cool. Also, as a kid I noticed that peeling the plastic tape off Bandaids would also generate some sparkage. This is probably the same thing as the Scotch tape phenomenon. Also, moving around one's legs while wearing polyester Superman pajamas under a blanket in winter would create tremendous sparks.