x-rays

SAN YSIDRO, Calif.--They were hidden in the gas tank -- 17 tightly-wrapped packages of marijuana weighing in at 38.44 pounds.

The car was nondescript, a green 1999 Mazda 626. The driver was a male 50-year-old Mexican national, a resident of Tijuana who had presumably been hoping to make it into California without being stopped.

Instead, the man got caught with the massive haul of pot, snared by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers here at the world's busiest border crossing using several tools in their arsenal -- some high-tech, some very low-tech -- to find … Read more

Researchers at the University of Liverpool say they have developed a new imaging technique that will help them identify, and thus analyze, tissue fibers in the heart that control whether the muscle beats regularly.

Using a micro CT scanner, the team imaged hearts whose tissue had been highlighted using iodine. The scientists discovered that certain tissue -- the conducting tissue that sends an electrical wave to trigger each heartbeat -- absorbed less of the solution than the muscular tissue.

This contrast made it easier to identify which tissue was producing electrical activity in 3D, which has until this study had … Read more

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

Scientists have developed a way to look inside a whole cell that doesn't involve the usual method of slicing and staining in the lab. Instead, you might say they're employing X-ray vision.

By using soft X-ray tomography (SXT), researchers can take images of a cell every 100 milliseconds and then re-create a whole picture of it from about 90 to 200 images in just a few minutes. The news was presented Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, according to Science Now. (The AAAS publishes Science Now.)

In the image of … Read more

Apparently Superman isn't the only one with X-ray vision.

During his nearly two-decade career, British photographer Nick Veasey has been using his own superpowers to peer inside everything from insects to MP3 players to jumbo jets--and create stunning images of their innards.

And like any accomplished superhero (or artist), Veasey makes it look easy.

To view one of his X-ray photos is to think the trick was simply in choosing the proper-size machine for the job and rather lazily pushing the button. In this scenario, the insect and the MP3 player were no-brainers. As for the passenger plane, the difficulty was just in locating an X-ray machine big enough to use on the thing (or--a more imaginative viewer might think--to shrink the plane, complete with a crew member or two, down enough to fit into a doctor's office).… Read more

Internal Homeland Security documents describing specifications for border-crossing scanners, which emit gamma or X-ray radiation to probe vehicles and their occupants, are raising new health and privacy concerns, CNET has learned.

Even though a public outcry has prompted Homeland Security to move away from adding X-ray machines to airports--it purchased 300 body scanners last year that used alternative technology instead--it appears to be embracing them at U.S.-Mexico land border crossings as an efficient way to detect drugs, currency, and explosives.

A 63-page set of specifications (PDF), heavily redacted, obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center through the Freedom … Read more

No one can deny that human being do things they sometimes regret.

These things seem like good ideas at the time. And then, well, you end up in the ER being X-rayed.

It is, therefore, both exhilarating and instructive to look at some of the pictures from a new book called "Stuck Up."

This tome for our ages (but not necessarily all ages) features 100 X-rays that have revealed strange objects perched inside people's bodies.

As the Huffington Post displays it, people do end up going to hospital with iPods inside them. Cassette tapes, too. Although the … Read more

I am always of two minds about knowing what my neighbors are doing behind their closed doors. I know it must be something weird.

Why, one of my neighbors sits in his car--which is running and parked outside my house--for hours on end watching videos. Of course, he's married.

So I (or at least a part of me) is grateful that I might soon have the opportunity to see straight through their walls and spy on what kinds of videos they watch at home. You see, extremely clever people at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory have come up with a … Read more

We're seeing the above video spreading around the Internet, and while it's cool, and it's based on real science, we're calling an early April Fools' gag.

U.K. comedian, tech-head, and all-around good nerd Jason Bradbury is seen in the vid using a pair of cheap night vision goggles, cling wrap, and an iPad 2's camera to take a revealing photo of himself--through his clothes.

The idea is based on an inadvertent side effect that some camcorders with low-light functions experienced about a decade ago. The cameras worked by emitting infrared light via special LEDs. The camera, when in "night vision" mode, would then record video in infrared instead of visible light. Some cameras, though, generated an "X-ray effect," allowing the viewer to see through the clothes of the person being videotaped.

This phenomenon was well documented and later-generation cameras were modified to exclude the "feature." While Bradbury's setup is more or less similar to the one employed by the first-generation naked-inducing cameras, we're not remotely convinced. … Read more