Using X-ray Radiography To Reveal Ancient Insects

1shooter writes "Researchers in France are using a synchrotron as a giant X-ray machine to peer into the insides of opaque amber to reveal insects dating from the age of dinosaurs. 'The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, produces an intense, high-energy light that can pierce just about any material, revealing its inner structure... From more than 600 blocks, they have identified nearly 360 fossil animals: wasps, flies, ants, spiders.' The process reveals detailed 3D images that can be used to make near-perfect enlarged scale models of the bugs using a 'plastic printer.'"

Comments

How many furlongs is that?

[Skevin]

> From more than 600 blocks, they have identified nearly 360 fossil animals: wasps,
> flies, ants, spiders

Why so far away? They might get better resolution if they held the sample right up next to the machine.

Solomon Chang

Re:How many furlongs is that?

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

>why the need for a synchrotron?

Resolution. Details are shown at the micron level.

Re:How many furlongs is that?

[sokoban]

What I'm wondering is, why the need for a synchrotron? Why not just any old X-ray machine? It seems from the video that the technique they're using needs collimated and coherent light. It seems that they are measuring the change in coherence based on the light being shined through the sample in order to calculate density differences and show structure. They're not doing diffraction measurements here, and the samples don't look like they're large enough to require the intensity generated by a SLS.

Re:How many furlongs is that?

[H0D_G]

The technique is similar to in line holography, in that the resultant image (a phase-contrast X-ray image)is constructed from the phase information of the light, as distinct from the intensity. phase contrast imaging is good for 'squishy' structures as it only needs a very small shift in refractive index to influence the phase, meaning that structures similar in density (ie, that would look similar on a conventional X-ray) can be produced.

Re:How many furlongs is that?

[RealGrouchy]

*looks up from the amber specimen*

"That's not a bug, it's a feature!"

- RG>

Re:How many furlongs is that?

[jd]

That and x-ray purity, and a highly controllable coherent source (you can set the energy to what you like), one ring can have hundreds of outlets whereas one laser has one, and they are Seriously Geeky.

Yes, but...

[Naughty Bob]

Researchers in France are using a synchrotron as a giant X-ray machine......Do they run Linacs?

dating?

[r00b]

I didn't realize that insects have been dating for millions of years.

Re:dating?

[nospam007]

I didn't realize that insects have been dating for millions of years.

That's how they survived (unlike us nerds) to this very day.

Holotype

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

A very interesting sidelight of this is that they "print" a 3d model of the data in plastic, and this model becomes part of the official holotype of the new species. A first for taxonomy, I believe. A 1 mm wasp gets turned into a highly detailed 30 cm model. Very cool, at least if you're a biologist.

Re:Holotype

[Benson Arizona]

The 3-D model is then encased in Amber, for protection and buried for the pleasure of future palaeontologists. Ohh wait...

Re:Holotype

[ortholattice]

The 3-D printing I've heard about builds up the model layer by layer. One thing I don't understand is how they "print" the legs, antennae, etc., since these (if pointing downwards) would have to be suspended in mid-air until the layers that attach them are printed, i.e. they would fall off. So do they print these separately then glue them on?

One thing I would like to see is the following. Even though I've never heard of it, it is possible that this has been thought of and/or patented. But if not, this post documents the idea here first as prior art, which I contribute to the public domain. Or if it has been thought of, kudos to the inventor.

The printer would start with a solid block of a mostly transparent, wax-like or plastic-like substance with a low melting point. When a focused laser beam or other focused source of energy is applied to a point (voxel) inside the block, the plastic in that voxel will "cure" i.e. harden. Perhaps it is the temperature that causes the hardening, or perhaps it is the action of a UV light like they do to cure fillings at the dentist. After all voxels constituting the model are scanned, the whole block is heated up (to below the curing point but higher than the melting point), and the uncured substance will melt away from the model for reuse in the next model.

With this method, you could even have hollow models by curing the voxels in a shell at the surface of the model, then leaving a hole at the bottom for the uncured substance to melt out of. This would save money if the strength of a solid model isn't needed. This shell could even be paper-thin if you just want a quick if fragile visual idea of what's going to be "printed", then strengthen it for the final version.

I'm sure there would be many technical hurdles to overcome, not the least of which is finding a suitable substance with the properties I described.

Peer through opaque objects

[garett_spencley]

"The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, produces an intense, high-energy light that can pierce just about any material,"

Does anyone know where I can obtain one of these devices ?

I always thought they were just a novelty sold via mail order in Mad Magazines. Can't tell you how many times I've been disappointed. If this is the real deal then please ...

Re:Peer through opaque objects

[Caesar Tjalbo]

I want one on a shark.

Yours for $3.99 + S&H

[EmbeddedJanitor]

http://www.stupid.com/stat/XRAY.html

Re:Uh, how?

[Naughty Bob]

It's almost as if they'd need a giant X-ray machine!

New application

[Roger W Moore]

I wonder if this technique will work with Fortran code we still use in our Monte-carlo generators for the LHC. I'm sure it also contains ancient bugs....

Re:Today must be redundant day today.

[Anonymous Coward]

X-ray Radiography - as opposed to Gamma-ray Radiography
into the insides - yeah that one is redundant
intense, high-energy - it's possible to have high intensity streams of low-energy photons, likewise low intensity streams of high-energy photons.

Re:Today must be redundant day today.

[H0D_G]

Actually, intense and high energy are not necessarily the same thing, especially in terms of radiation. intense means that the number of photons over an incident area is high, whilst high energy means that the photons are from the higher frequency end of the X-ray spectrum.

Just an educated guess, they run Linux.

[gnutoo]

HPC is pretty much Linux dominated and you need some serious horsepower to do 1000 angle sinogram backprojection of cm sized volumes with micron sized beams. A cubic cm would have 10E4 x 10E4 x 10E4 voxels, each with 10E3 angles. Hubba, hubba. They will also have to apply some kind of filtering to each sinogram and probably have to tweak that filter multiple times on lower resolution scans to get it right, and they want to do several a day. I've seen Microsoft clusters choke on networking problems for much less challenging work.

They laughed! At ME!? I'll show these fools!

[Scrameustache]

"The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, produces an intense, high-energy light that can pierce just about any material,"

Does anyone know where I can obtain one of these devices ?

I always thought they were just a novelty sold via mail order in Mad Magazines. Can't tell you how many times I've been disappointed. If this is the real deal then please ... I was thinking more along the lines of a small device for amplification by stimulated emission of radiation of that "high-energy light that can pierce just about any material", and having said contraption affixed to the pericerebral cartilaginous structure of a shark.

I expect that the project would cost around... one MILLION dollars!

Re:Next generation of machines

[Btarlinian]

Having the use of the SLC linac certainly made life easier for LCLS, but XFEL is being built on completely virgin ground. If (and it's more of an "if" than a lot of people want to admit) LCLS works, then the demand for X-FELs will be *huge*. There are rumours of a second being planned at SLAC, and one in the UK. These machines are very very cool, and stunningly useful for many other fields of research. I'd bet they won't be able to build these machines fast enough to satisfy demand!

I've never heard of that before, (specifically the second one at SLAC, would it use electron beams from the existing linac or a new one?). The only thing I've heard of is that there are talks of possibly turning PEP-II into a extremely low emittance synchrotron radiation source,a la PETRA, since there's basically not going to be any more accelerator based particle physics at SLAC. Are there really questions as to whether the LCLS will work (i.e., meet its stated design parameters), or do they center more around its actual utility?

It's true that accelerator science has been driven by HEP, but most accelerator physicists (like me) will admit that their market is changing, and our future customers will be biologists and chemists, not physicists. I hope so, because it's a really amazing field, but I don't see much of a demand for advances in the field from chemistry/biology/applied physicists. As far as I can tell there isn't much of a point to building synchrotrons of an energy higher than 9-10 GeV. Even greater brightness isn't of much use anymore, at least in X-ray crystallography (according to the people I have talked to, IANAC(rystallographer)). The only thing that can really seems to be of use now is lowering emittance, which is not as monumental of a technical challenge as perfecting higher frequency klystrons, etc.

I've never heard the story about XFEL being hampered by length. Do you mean the German one, or were you referring to LCLS?

I was referring to the German one. I heard a story at SLAC from a presenter from DESY in which he said that there were a bunch of bureaucratic hassles with the linac for the XFEL since it extended into another county. (He wasn't actually working on the project though, and didn't say that it ended up causing any specific problems.) I think the main issue is the sheer cost of building something like that, according to the XFEL's website, construction costs 968 million Euros. That's only construction costs. At current (Google) exchange rates, that's about $1.5 billion and I don't think there are many countries willing to shell out that kind of money. On the other hand, the newest light source under design, NSLS-II, will cost a total of about $750-900 million (there are conflicting reports) and that's including the little R & D they need to do. For a more current example, DIAMOND, the new UK synchrotron, cost only 260 million pounds plus 160 million pounds for additional beamlines for a total 835 million dollars. New light sources such as 4GLS in Britain, an ERL and FEL combination of sorts, have been cancelled. I really don't think they are going to be that many new XFELs. At the very least I doublt they will become anywhere as common as synchrotron radiation sources, of which there at least 4 in the US with large user groups (APS, ALS, SSRL, NSLS).