

Scotch tape found to emit x-rays by behaving like a particle accelerator - Natsu
http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/64111/title/Tale_of_the_tape_

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jcromartie
Between this and isolating graphene sheets, I think Scotch tape deserves the
next nobel prize in physics.

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jrockway
I love blog comments. The first one:

 _Doesnt this mean that Scotch tape users are frequently subject to radiation
exposure?_

From the article:

 _No need to worry about radiation exposure at the office — at atmospheric
pressure, where air molecules bustle, the electrons quickly run into other
particles before they can radiate X-rays._

Do people really just read the title and then post a comment? Why?

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marze
I remember hearing a lecture many years ago given by Seth Putterman, the
researcher in this study. Unless I'm confusing him with another researcher, he
claimed in the lecture that the underlying mechanisms behind static
electricity were not understood. I've asked other scientist now and then but
have never found anyone else who would confirm that claim.

The idea is that by rubbing a balloon on your head, you add energy of a
fraction of an electron volt to each electron on average, yet you can generate
potential difference of 1000s of volts, so how does the diffuse energy input
get concentrated to the small fraction of electrons at the high potential.
Someday I'd like to hear an expert explanation.

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kordless
This news is really old. The use of scotch tape to create a particle
accelerator out of a pencil is not:
[http://www.deccanherald.com/content/104044/promise-
graphene....](http://www.deccanherald.com/content/104044/promise-
graphene.html)

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scott_s
When reporting science, it's often not useful to start off with the newest
thing. Doing so presumes the reader knew about the old thing, which of often
not the case. Hence, the new thing is a few paragraphs in:

 _To track where the X-rays travel, Australian scientists rigged up Scotch
tape on a spool driven by a motor (the lab’s first prototype spun on an
electric drill). The X-rays mostly sprayed at a right angle to the direction
the tape was pulled, the researchers report in the Sept. 29 Applied Physics
Letters. That’s a convenient property, because herding light into a straight
line normally absorbs the light’s energy, but the tape naturally emits X-rays
in a straight line to within 5 degrees.

“Tape is an even better use as an X-ray source than we thought,” says
Putterman, who first observed the phenomenon and reported in May that
bremsstrahlung radiation is the X-ray source in a May paper in Applied Physics
B: Lasers and Optics._

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zipdog
I wonder if this has any bearing on the force field that 3M accidentally
created in one of their factories.

<http://amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.html>

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CWIZO
The page seems to be down. Here is a text-only cached version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TpSleMI...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TpSleMIxqdwJ:www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/64111/title/Tale_of_the_tape_+http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/64111/title/Tale_of_the_tape_&hl=en&strip=1)

