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X-Rays Emitted From Ordinary Scotch Tape
Maximum Prophet writes "When I was in High School, I built an X-Ray machine that (probably) didn't produce any X-Rays. I used an old vacuum tube and high voltage. Little did I know that simple triboluminescence would have enough energy to do useful work." The catch: you'll need to peel your tape in a vacuum, and have the x-ray film at the ready.
Light bulbs also emit radiation.
Most of that tends to be in the visible/infrared/ultraviolet depending on the specific bulb.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Publishing "Peeling transparent tape in a vacuum produces x-rays" is not the same as patenting "A mobile x-ray device with no power requirements, with x-rays being generated by peeling transparent tape"
I'm not big on patents but seems to me they've taken a process, added a novel and non-trivial addition and made a "potentially" very practical invention. This is the kind of things patents were made for. If it were that obvious, wouldn't someone have done something with it in the last half of a century?
Now there may be other things that might speak to it's novelty, but from the article, seems fair to me.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.