Sent to us from Jacquie:
“Hey Science Cheerleader–better wear your lead apron when you scotch-tape your press clippings from Innovations2008 to the wall: Scotch tape and X rays!”
NEW YORK (AP): 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.”
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.
DIY: Peel Scotch tape off its 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, will emerge from very close to where the tape comes 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.
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