Unrolling Household Tape Produces X-Rays
If you have ever (for whatever reason – that’s none of our business) locked yourself in a dark closet and peeled Scotch tape from its holder, you may have noticed a tiny bit of light. The tape actually emits a faint luminescence when it’s being separated. It’s due to a phenomenon known as triboluminescence, which has been documented as far back as the 17th century. In the 1950s, Soviet researchers claimed that unrolling sticky tape resulted also in the release of X-rays, but no one really bothered to follow up on that study until now.
A group of researchers at UCLA decided to test the X-ray claims recently. Using a machine to unroll the tape at 3 centimeters/second in a vacuum, they measured the electromagnetic output. The short bursts of X-rays lasted for about a billionth of a second each and output 300,000 X-ray photons. The researchers were even able to prove the presence of the X-rays by producing pictures of their finger bones. There’s no need to worry about getting a super-dose of radiation while taping the paper on birthday presents, though; the phenomenon seems to work only when the tape is in a vacuum.
The applications for this new knowledge are kind of sketchy at this point. The research team thinks that it may be useful for making cheaper X-ray machines or even for aiding in nuclear fusion. Both seem a little far-fetched, but harnessing this little-understood physical phenomenon may even create new, unforeseen possibilities in the future.
How Much Water is On Earth?
In this illustration, the blue ball represents the volume of all the water on earth, relative to the size of the earth. The tiny speck to the right of the blue ball represents Earth’s fresh water. CREDIT: David Gallo/WHOI
If Earth was the size of a basketball, all of its water would fit into a ping pong ball.
How much water is that? It’s roughly 326 million cubic miles (1.332 billion cubic kilometers), according to a recent study from the U.S. Geological Survey. Some 72 percent of Earth is covered in water, but 97 percent of that is salty ocean water and not suitable for drinking.
“There’s not a lot of water on Earth at all,” said David Gallo, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts.
WARR
(Source: scottmontoya, via eternally-teenage)
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita… “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
