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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.
does this mean that x-mas gifts can give you cancer?
The catch: you'll need to peel your tape in a vacuum
I've been practicing this for years. I knew it would come in handy some day.
Sounds like a job for....
THE GLOVEBOX!!!
No, not that glovebox, this glovebox. What do you think this is, a redneck website?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The claims for the patent are, of course, not really indicated, but since the article itself states
Actually, more than 50 years ago, some Russian scientists reported evidence of X-rays from peeling sticky tape off glass.
I hope that either they've invented something truly novel to do with this effect or they get a big, fat denied letter in the mail from the USPTO.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It was cleverly disguised as a malfunctioning computer monitor.
Getting your face and eyes hit by needlepoints of pain isn't an experience I care to repeat. It's fun for about the first 15 seconds after that no so much.
The catch: you'll need to peel your tape in a vacuum
Oh trust me, I "peel my tape in a vacuum" all the time....
This guy's the limit!
I'm sure, almost certain, that the ripping sound you hear is the sound of a million geeks all pulling about 1.2 inches of tape off of their desktop dispenser.
Bonus points if it's now wrapped around your finger as a memento.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Did you know that Brazil nuts are radioactive? And so is granite! There's radiation everywhere! Luckily, I have a hat.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
...in Lake Superior.
They have an exhibit of one of the first x-ray machines.
It consists of a 6' diameter dispenser roll of scotch tape inside an even larger vacuum chamber.
They'll even let your kids take a complementary souvenir floroscope picture of themselves.
So I should avoid opening Christmas presents too close to the Hoover...check.
See, this is why I read Slashdot: useful tips like this one. My wife always runs the vacuum around the Christmas tree before we go to bed on Christmas Eve, and often she just leaves it there right by the tree. Luckily, my kids have developed gift opening techniques that somehow manage to rip the wrapping paper into several hundred small pieces without ever disengaging the tape, so they probably haven't been exposed to too much radiation thus far, but we'll have to be sure to put the vacuum back in the closet before going to bed from now on.
There goes my plans for building the biggest ball of Scotch Tape!!!
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
You're probably thinking of black body radiation, which is decidedly different from this. For a black body to emit enough X-rays to do any useful work, it'd have to be pretty damn hot (something glowing red-hot is around 1000K). In other words, this seems to be an interesting discovery.
I wonder how this is going to affect items with similar properties (like good ol' duct tape) while at the space station.
"Hey! there's a leak on the outside wall but damn it, they wouldn't let us bring any duct tape!" :)
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. -- Groucho Marx
"Hey baby, I'm gonna get some scotch tape cause I wanna see your insides."
-or-
"If I'm scotch tape and your the vacuum then why don't we go release some energy."
-or even-
"If you want rapid pulses, I'll give you 1.2 inches a second."
but instead you went with:
Oh trust me, I "peel my tape in a vacuum" all the time....
I'm sorry but I just can't accept that.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Or a pony.
In which case the pony-shaped wrapping and the labored breathing give it away.
Can anyone with more of a clue than I have about such things maybe give us a high-level summary as to exactly what mechanism is at play here?
I find myself having no idea of how this would work, and TFA doesn't really seem to say much about the mechanism. It just seems so damned bizarre.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
A more practical approach might be to have two wide wheels, one covered in the substance, and the other with a smooth non-stick surface centered in a vaccum ball. The substance could be reapplied easily whenever need be, and be a little less ridiculous.
My duct tape produces cold fusion!
:q! Oh crap, not again...
Will this lead to a wave of new sticky-tape-related superheroes?
I see you got to your pony on xmas faster than I did.
I used an old vacuum tube and high voltage.
Well, I don't necessarily endorse your kink, but if it provides a cost effective alternative to Viagra for you ...
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
We will not see this technology being used to actually help people for 20+ years. The researchers have already been paid to discover this result in their salaries. Why should they be paid again on the backs of those who actually develop practical uses for this discovery? Of what benefit is it to society for this technology to be hoarded by a small few?
The patenting of scientific phenomena is a shameful institution that needs to be stopped. A university is not supposed to be a for profit institution.
May the Maths Be with you!
X-rays and other radiation are no longer the superhero-creating mystery factor. It's genetic engineering now. Get with the times!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If not, we should add this to the list of uses for Duct-tape. I am also curious about if the stickiness factor were to increase, would the pulses or x-rays increase as well? What about other adhesive media?
I'm all for this path for science so long as the technology stays out of the hands of TSA agents.
Where am I gonna get a piece of tape in space...at this hour?
Typical X-ray machines use 50 to 200 kilovolts and milliamps of electrons slamming into a tungsten target. Nothing less will do.
It's kinda unlikely Scotch (brand) tape can bypass all the bottlenecks and emit copious X-rays.
It's much more likely they're getting electrostatic discharges in the film. The New Age loonballs call it "Kirlian Photography".
I'll be glad to eat a hat if this pans out. Until then I'll just wear it.
a phenomenon I learned about in photography class many years ago. Back in the days of film a roll of 35mm film was attached to the spool inside the canister by a small bit of tape. In the darkroom as you disassembled the canister to remove the film for processing, if you peeled this tape quickly the "peeling", or "stretching" adhesive would glow. We learned to peel the tape slowly because the glow from rapidly pulled tape was sufficient to fog film.
With the work Ive done with high power vaccum tubes (> 30 Kilowatts output), it has become standard practice for Eimac and other manufacturers to list dangers for them.
eg., the 4-1000 tetrode, with > 12 KV on the anode, will emit xrays. As will almost ANY other tetrode or triode in existance.
I'd say the person who wrote the article didn't understand that He'd need THAT much anode voltage to get the tube to emit.
That being said, I'd almost have to say that the scotch tape being used to emit the XRays would be doing so because of a HUGE electrostatic (static electricity) charge.
Most of the tubes I work with are a quarter megawatt can be seen on my old website, http://www.bigradios.com/tollfree
--Toll_Free
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No, he's talking about how all heavy particles will eventually decay down to iron, which doesn't decay further on its own without energy input.
...EVERYTHING in the universe is radioactive to some degree. Except for iron.
To be radioactive you have to have nuclei. 96% of the Universe is Dark Matter and Dark Energy that does not contain any nuclei. Of the remaining 4% the vast majority is in stable isotopes of hydrogen and helium and so is not radioactive. Additionally there are radioactive isotopes of iron. Iron-56 may be the most stable atomic nucleus but there are many other isotopes of iron some of which are radioactive.
So it in a movie last year. Wink. Wink.
There's a lot of mechanical energy involved in peeling tape. (Including creating and depositing the glue & tape film)
I'm not sure why he would think that, as they won't. Stable elements are quite stable. Granted that iron is the most stable of them all, but that doesn't mean everything has the possiblity of reaching that minimum.
There's an informative video in Nature about the phenomenom and the experiment: http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/x-rays/
They even show how to take x-rays using scotch tape.
All Rights Reversed.
In 10^1500 years, cold fusion occurring via quantum tunnelling should make the light nuclei in ordinary matter fuse into iron-56 nuclei (see isotopes of iron.) Fission and alpha-particle emission should make heavy nuclei also decay to iron, leaving stellar-mass objects as cold spheres of iron.
Don't save the big one for last.
I guess that solves the x-ray problem. Lots of glue for next xmas.
According to John T.M. Lyles, an engineer who works on megawatt and bigger amps and oscillators for the federal government at an installation in New Mexico, it takes > 8 KV to emit xrays that would be measurable or damaging.
contesting.com amps reflector has a nice email exchange on it, as does the Yahoo.com ham amps reflector.
NO, not every tube will emit xrays. EMITTING xrays is what's dangerous. Just because a ceramic / metal triode / tetrode is GENERATING them, if it doesn't escape the envelope, it's not emitting them.
Kind of like your microwave. It shouldn't be emitting microwaves, but it creates them.
Hope that makes sense, or at least makes my point.
--Toll_Free
Don't know if it works for all brands of self-seal envelopes, or only some. Not aware of any exhaustive studies on envelope-adhesive types.
Eric Baird
Hmm, I guess you're right, tunneling would do that in the end. 10^1500 years is a bit of a timescale, though.
Also, would there be any energy over for actual radioactivity, in a reaction like that?
I wonder if different kinds of tape would generate different amounts of x-rays depending on stickiness -- for example, duct tape or packing tape.
I suppose it's kind of hard to use tape in the vacuum of space since the cold also tends to ruin the stickiness almost immediately...
http://www.tenjou.net/
Someone tell that to Iron 55.
I can see the fnords!
Actually, you have to contain a particle that either decays or wants very much to fly away.
Most of the candidates for dark matter either have some kind of (very slow) decay process or can annihilate, producing gamma rays.
When I peel the plastic backing off a new bandaid in the dark, it glows along the separating point where the backing peels off the adhesive. Even the paper wrapping package of the individual bandaid glows as I peel it apart along its glued seams.
Is there x-ray frequency light that I'm not seeing in that glowing little miracle?
--
make install -not war
That's cause he got it on xrays, which is obviously before xmas.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
This does not surprise me too much. Last year the glue on an envelope also emitted a blueish light as I opened it (without tearing the paper). I already wondered if this was a know effect.
Secondly, to make a decent amount of x-rays, the applied voltage needs to be a fair bit higher than what is normally used in a colour picture tube to generate the image. The O.P. said it was faulty, perhaps it could have generated it. But there are normally multiple protection circuits on the EHT that prevent this (as in, they go "phut" before the voltage gets that high and the monitor shuts off/never works again).
You know, I don't think that's entirely true. I used to repair televisions, and I don't remember anything in the circuits being designed specifically to prevent an overvoltage condition on the CRT 2nd anode.
In fact, I remember most of the older color sets had a warning label in the back about the fact that the CRT would produce X-rays if the voltage was turned up too high.
The really old sets that still used a vacuum tube (aka valve) to rectify the 2nd anode voltage had that tube inside a steel box, since that rectifier tube was more than capable of emitting x-rays if the voltage went high enough. It seems to me that if there had been anything in the circuit to prevent the overvoltage condition, the TV set manufacturer wouldn't have spent the money to build a metal x-ray shielding box. I remember one TV in particular had a prominent warning stamped on the removable access panel on the metal box that held the rectifier tube telling the repairman to reinstall the cover to prevent x-ray leakage.
Isn't one problem with X-rays and similar radiation that the risk is cumulative? So a low dose over a very long time could be the same as a short duration high-rate dose?
I don't think anyone can feel x-rays though. That sounds a little silly.
Hulk smash!
Putting moderation advice in your
I understand that demos may be simplified, but this one is ridiculous, for many reasons.
* There isn't any attempt made to check for actual x-rays. The crystal and geiger counter are both sensitive to a very wide spectrum.
* The sensors could be fooled by static discharges. Geiger counters and scintilating crystals are both very sensitive to electric fields, just what you expect to find around tape and adhesives and friction.
* The geiger counter is not a calibrated piece of lab equipment, but just about the cheapest handheld consumer device. Does not reflect well on the experimenters scientific accuracy.
* They don't take the slightest effort to filter out non x-rays. A simple piece of aluminum foil over the plexiglass cover would stop electric fields, the most probably confounding element. Even Roentgen was more scientific, determining that X-rays acted like light, in that they could be reflected and refracted. 130 years later and these guys can't even do the simple due diligence that's been in the books for over a century.
* These guys have no clue what's happening. A scientist would try to work up a theory and a mechanism for X-ray emission. Quite a challenge as x-ray radiation is almost always associated with abrupt electron acceleration near high-Z elements.
All in all the demo video is very shabby experimentation, I don't dare call it "science". If it was science they would try null experiments, say using other sources of sparks against their rather inappropriate sensors. This does not seem to have been done.
All the known unstable subatomic particles have lifetimes so small on the scale of the universe that there will be none left unless you have continuous production somehow which will have to be under very special circumstances. Some Dark Matter (I would dispute most) candidates have an annihilation possibility (not decay then annihilate, just annihilate) but this does not mean that they are radioactive any more than a proton is radioactive because it can annihilate with an anti-proton.
I guess you are asserting that dark matter doesn't form into quasi-stable clumps that occasionally decay into other clumps releasing (radiating) some particles in the process.
Correct. Almost no theoretical models allow for this because it is very hard to allow DM decay emitting radiation without us having already detected it. Co-annihilation is a possibility but this is not decay but a reaction and hence not radioactivity. Given that the vast majority of physicists already know this I doubt this will earn me a Nobel prize unless there is one for stating the obvious.
If you had a bunch of protons and a bunch of anti-protons I think you'd probably be quite inclined to call the mixture "radioactive." It would certainly be spewing radiation at you most enthusiastically.
I would not call it radioactive - I would say that it emits radiation. Radioactivity is a property of an atomic nucleus see here and here. If you are generous you could extend it to decays of subatomic particles but it does not really stretch to radiation produced by interacting subatomic particles!