Tag: XRAY

Think, for a moment, about lightning. With all our talk of sci-fi and high-tech, we often forget that, in our world, since long before the dawn of man, rays of fatal electricity have shot down from the sky to stab the earth. Crazy. And it's crazier still to think that we've never tamed it -- never used it to power our personal hovercrafts. Of course, before the other day, we'd never taken an X-ray ...

The Dan Evans Facebook Memorial page and teens tossing hot sauce at an unsuspecting fast food worker confirm that tasteless pranks aren't ever going away. But 19-year-old Huang Chen just might stumble home with the dubious distinction for being the victim of the worst prank ever. Earlier this week, a drunken Chen checked into the Hunan Hangtian Hospital in Changsha, China griping about ...

We all hate airport security checkpoints. We hate the wait, the lines and the fact that we always seem to wear mismatching socks on the day we fly (seriously!). That said, the checkpoints are essential to public safety, and we deal with them accordingly. A controversial scanning technology we reported on last year is taking passenger security to the next level, and, for some people, it is one ...

Stock photography is, more often than not, a necessary evil. We use a number of boilerplate images (some more often than we should), and companies are quick to break out photos of the everyday woman doing something vaguely relevant when assembling reports, brochures, and newsletters. Usually, however, stock photographs are carefully chosen to be inoffensive and avoid grabbing attention. This ...

Straight from our "seriously?" files comes a scientific discovery that has us scratching our heads. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have discovered that peeling Scotch tape in a vacuum tube generates X-rays. We're wondering what on Earth inspired these scientists to put a roll of Scotch tape in a vacuum in the first place. It only reinforces our suspicions that ...

People love to talk about how smart their dogs are. They'll tell you about how Fido can identify their car just from the sound of the engine, that he knows when he has done something wrong and that he'll punish himself, or that he can do so many amazing tricks. The sad truth of the matter, however, is that dogs are stupid. Adorable? Sure. Friendly? Sometimes. But smart? Not so much. Take the ...

The British military is testing a new helmet that allows fighter pilots to see through their planes. The system is actually very elegant in its simplicity. A series of camera are placed on the outside of the plane. The images from the cameras are fed back to the cockpit where they are projected inside the specially designed helmet, allowing the pilot to see 360 degrees around him/her. It will ...