flickering pictures

The Los Angeles Times reports that peeling a strip of Scotch tape off the roll in a vacuum chamber releases enough energy to x-ray your finger. The process is called triboluminescence and apparently creates visible light, too — something you can try at home — though you likely haven’t noticed unless you’ve been taping things in the dark.

From the Times:

What was surprising was that the X-rays were not produced continuously, but were emitted in nanosecond bursts containing about 1 million X-ray photons apiece, the equivalent of about a tenth of a milliwatt of energy. That was enough energy to produce an X-ray image in a second, compared with about a third of a second required for a dental X-ray, Putterman said.

[…] The team’s next effort will be to try to build an X-ray generator that brings two pieces of tape together and separates them at, say, 1,000 times per second with a piezoelectric device. “We would have a new, controllable source of radiation, and have to look at the possibility it could be miniaturized,” he said.

Though it’s a little early to envision whole cities powered by giant rolls of Scotch tape being unraveled at lightning speed, there are potential applications for inexpensive x-ray machines in parts of the world where conventional rigs are too expensive to consider.

If you’re in a mad scientist sort of mood and haven’t got any tape handy, Wikipedia says you can get the same light effect by opening most postal envelopes in the dark. And then there’s always the old Wintergeen Lifesavers trick.

Thanks, Theo!
Image via Rampant Scotland.

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