Sticky Tape Found To Emit Terahertz Radiation

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from New Scientist "'Peeling sticky tape has already been shown to produce X-rays, so Joseph Horvat and Roger Lewis of the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, tried to see if it could create lower-frequency terahertz radiation. "We were rather pleasantly surprised to obtain a clear signal in our first attempt," says Horvat. Strongly adhesive Scotch Magic 810 tape and weakly adhesive electrical tape both yielded strong terahertz signals, ranging from 0.1 to 10 terahertz, but only about a microwatt of power, too little for practical use (Optics Letters, vol 34, p 2195). Horvat says that refinements should increase the power by orders of magnitude.' It may be old news to Slashdot that [peeling clear tape] had been proved to produce X-rays, but watching the linked video where they use tape to expose X-ray film was pretty amazing."

Comments

European Intellect vs African "Intellect"

[Anonymous Coward]

The scientific accomplishments by people of European ancestry are astounding. This discovery of high-frequency radiation from simple tape is another such accomplishment.

A visit to the web site of the Nobel committee reveals that most of the winners of the Nobel prize in physics is European. People of Japanese ancestry also deserve accolades. In fact, the 2008 Nobel prize in physics went exclusively to 3 Japanese geniuses.

Notably missing from the technical accomplishments are Africans and African-Americans. Not surprisingly, the IQ of the typical African is about 20 points lower than the IQ of the typical Japanese or European.

Next, some African supremacist will claim that IQ measures nothing or that IQ is biased in favor of "Whites". Well, as for the last claim, the Japanese -- who are quite un-White -- do quite well on IQ tests.

As for the first claim, let us not waste time on refuting this nonsense. Let's agree with it -- only in the case of African-Americans. What do I mean? A large class of medicines is banned from use because they cause neural damage that lowers IQ. In the case of African children, we should prescribe those drugs to them. Since IQ measures nothing, these medicines must -- by the logic of African supremacists -- be quite safe. Those drugs should continue to be banned for use by non-Black children. However, we should feed those drugs to Black children. On this matter, we in the non-Black intelligentsia should be be willing to meet African-Americans "halfway" -- for the sake of racial harmony.