Quote: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.

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.

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. After all, you could peel tape or do something similar in such machines with just human power, like cranking.

The researchers and UCLA have applied for a patent covering such devices.

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.

"If you're going to peel tape in a vacuum, you should be extra careful," he said. But "I will continue to use Scotch tape during my daily life, and I think it's safe to do it in your office. No guarantees."

James Hevezi, who chairs the American College of Radiology's Commission on Medical Physics, said the notion of developing an X-ray machine from the new finding was "a very interesting idea, and I think it should be carried further in research."

Quote:The Office of Naval Research just threw a $1.6m grant at some UCSD researchers, to be used to build a "field hospital on a chip". The system will monitor a few biomarkers for deviations from safe levels, at which point it will automatically medicate its wearer. While the military hopes that such a device could provide first aid to wounded soldiers, the technology could also find plenty of practical uses in medicine, especially for doling out insulin to diabetics or anesthetic to chronic pain sufferers.

Anyway, forget about the olds — the military applications are what's exciting about this. Take a current soldier's body armor, night vision goggles and communications equipment, throw in an automatic medical treatment unit and voila! You've basically got Gordon Freeman's HEV suit. There is no indication that the suit will make the satisfying "uhhuummuhhuummuhhuumm" sound like Mr. Freeman's, but there's no indication that it won't, either

Quote:What would GE's founder Thomas Edison have said? The company has confirmed that it has stopped developing a high efficiency version of its first product – the incandescent lightbulb.

Research on the product was aiming to create household lighting as efficient as a compact fluorescent lightbulb (CFL), but without the hazardous chemicals that represent the main environmental flaw in CFLs.

However, the company has said that it will now focus solely on developing fluorescent and LED-based technologies for household use.

The company first announced its high efficiency incandescent (HEI) lightbulb development programme in February last year. The product would have eventually been as efficient as the now-popular CFLs but without the added mercury that makes them difficult to dispose of.

(12-04-2008, 11:36 AM)Twin-Skies Wrote: GE pulls plug on incandescent bulbs

Quote:The Scorpion is one muscular, sleek looking vehicle. The initial production design includes an Acura V-tech, V-6 3.5 liter dual overhead cam, aluminum-magnesium block engine that puts out 289 horsepower in stock form, more than 450 with a twin turbo option. Yes, it puts out plenty of power and looks good doing it, but the Acura engine is about as efficient as you can get when it comes to internal combustion engine technology.

Moreover, in these energy, security, climate and eco-conscious times, Ronn Motor also aspires to making vehicles as clean and “green” as they can. Building from the ground up, the initial version of the Scorpion is of a type management calls a “mild hybrid”. Its body is made of lightweight, hand-built carbon fiber set over a chrome-molybdenum chassis. Xenon headlights and LED side markers, signal and brake lamps require less electrical power than conventional lighting.

Yet more intriguingly, the Scorpion is equipped with a Hydrogen On Demand system, which blends 130 octane hydrogen into the fuel mix in ratios of 30-50%. Hence, highway fuel economy will be in the 40 mile per gallon range while producing 450 hp with the twin-turbo option. The hydrogen fuel injection system increases fuel mileage between 15-35% on any internal combustion engine while reducing emissions to almost zero, the company claims.

Quote:Polaroid Abandons Instant Photography

It was a wonder in its time: A camera that spat out photos that developed themselves in a few minutes as you watched. You got to see them where and when you took them, not a week later when the prints came back from the drugstore.

But in a day when nearly every cellphone has a digital camera in it, “instant” photography long ago stopped being instant enough for most people. So today, the inevitable end of an era came: Polaroid is getting out of the Polaroid business.

The company, which stopped making instant cameras for consumers a year ago and for commercial use a year before that, said today that as soon as it had enough instant film manufactured to last it through 2009, it would stop making that, too. Three plants that make large-format instant film will close by the end of the quarter, and two that make consumer film packets will be shut by the end of the year, Bloomberg News reports.

The company, which will concentrate on digital cameras and printers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2001 and was acquired by a private investment company in 2005. It started in 1937 making polarized lenses for scientific and military applications, and introduced its first instant camera in 1948.

The Lede remembers fondly how magical it was to watch the image gradually manifest itself from the chemical murk right there in your hand. But truth be told, the Lede’s own scuffed Polaroid SX-70 camera, which used to get regular use in all manner of situations, from producing a quick step-by-step primer on how to do the Ickey Shuffle to documenting a problem with a house he was buying that cropped up the day before the closing, hasn’t come out of its cabinet drawer in years.

Loyal users take heart, though — Polaroid said it would happily license the technology to other manufacturers should they want to go on supplying the niche market with film after 2009.