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Wednesday, October 22, 2008
I am posting this purely as an interesting fact, knowing that I'm on thin ice here. SOME of you out there (and you know who you are ;-) ) plan your lives around the latest chemical or nutritional scares, and I'm forbidding you to do that in this case (unless you live in a vacuum chamber, in which case we really need to talk...). I just think it's fascinating that they'd discover this after 50 years!
NEW YORK (AP) - 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.
Who knew? Actually, more than 50 years ago, some Russian scientists reported evidence of X-rays from peeling sticky tape off glass. But the new work demonstrates that you can get a lot of X-rays, a study co-author says.
"We were very surprised," said Juan Escobar. "The power you could get from just peeling tape was enormous."
Tape measure: X-rays detected from Scotch tape
Labels: Science
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