X-Rays blasting from the tape dispenser!

Who here hasn’t used Scotch Tape to do impromptu X-Rays when creating unholy monsters in the laboratory? This is a simple trick employed by mad scientists across the globe, until one of them blabbed. Now I bet they will change the formula. Good going, blabber! I have to stock up on lots of Scotch Tape, too bad that when it yellows it gets 10% less effective. Don;t they know a recession is on? That even effects my wallet, as my trade in bizarre animal hybrids is down 50%. Thus I create less hyena men, as the current number of hyena men is more than enough than needed at evil lair employment hotspots. Luckily, I am starting a Goon Temp Agency to rent out employees of the crazed hybrid variety for temporary assignment to crazed madmen around the globe. I expect it will be quite popular with evil masterminds looking to cut costs and headcount reports. Then I can buy more Scotch Tape.

Tape measure: X-rays detected from Scotch tape

By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter, Ap Science Writer – Wed Oct 22, 7:33 pm ET

NEW YORK – Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape. It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers.

Who knew? Actually, more than 50 years ago, some Russian scientists reported evidence of X-rays from peeling sticky tape off glass. But the new work demonstrates that you can get a lot of X-rays, a study co-author says.
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He suggests that with some refinements, the process might be harnessed for making inexpensive X-ray machines for paramedics or for places where electricity is expensive or hard to get. After all, you could peel tape or do something similar in such machines with just human power, like cranking.

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In the new work, a machine peeled ordinary Scotch tape off a roll in a vacuum chamber at about 1.2 inches per second. Rapid pulses of X-rays, each about a billionth of a second long, emerged from very close to where the tape was coming off the roll.

That’s where electrons jumped from the roll to the sticky underside of the tape that was being pulled away, a journey of about two-thousandths of an inch, Escobar said. When those electrons struck the sticky side they slowed down, and that slowing made them emit X-rays.