Friday, January 18, 2013 - 12:29pm
Controversial new body scanners have turned every flight into an opportunity to have a naked scan of your body shown off to security agents, but that's all about to change.
X-Rays stories
Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - 6:09pm
Ben Krasnow must have some rough friends showing up to his parties, because he built his own airport-style backscatter X-ray machine using parts he picked up on eBay.
Monday, April 30, 2012 - 8:15am
X-rays are a powerful tool in the medical arsenal. They can be used for everything from confirming broken bones to helping diagnose certain cancers. A big downside is that they're not very mobile, but a new X-ray machine is about to change all that — not only are they portable, they are battery powered.
Friday, March 16, 2012 - 1:12pm
Next week, NASA is planning on launching a new space-based telescope: the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (or NuSTAR), which will start looking at all kinds of exciting and high energy astrophysical phenomena that are busily blowing up and/or tearing space to shreds.
Thursday, January 26, 2012 - 8:59am
An X-ray laser generating pulses a billion times brighter than any x-ray source prior has heated an ultra thin sample of aluminum to a record 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit. That's hotter than then sun's corona!
Thursday, December 8, 2011 - 8:47am
Antonio Stradivari's violins are considered the greatest ever made. Rare not only because just 650 out of 1,000 of his violins remain, but also because the tone they emit has never been replicated in other violins. New computer tomography has been used to harmlessly probe an existing Stradivarius to unlock its secrets and replicate it.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011 - 12:39pm
This is the Saturn pulsed power accelerator at Sandia National Labs in New Mexico. In just a few billionths of a second, this machine generates X-rays containing as much energy as the entire output of the U.S. electrical grid, fifty times over.
Friday, July 16, 2010 - 12:49pm
A gamma-ray burst from a star that collapsed to form a black hole long before our sun and planets formed overwhelmed NASA's orbiting Swift observatory, temporarily blinding it. The explosion from the flare-up, known as GRB 100621A, reached Earth on June 21, and its light was 140 times brighter than the brightest steady source of X-rays, a neutron star 500,000 times closer to Earth.
Monday, May 17, 2010 - 5:03am
Next time you go to an airport, there could be a new security measure waiting for you: an X-ray, full-body scanner. 52 of the scanners developed by a company called Rapiscan have been placed in 23 airports across the country,...
