X-rays...from peeling tape?!

This is really wild...

In experiments reported in the prestigious journal Nature, scientists at UCLA have shown that peeling tape off a roll can produce X-rays powerful enough to take medical photographs like the composite picture of a human finger on the left.
This seems to be an extreme case of triboluminescence, the process in which light is produced by friction. Though it's still not very well understood how triboluminescence happens, it probably has something to do with electric charges being torn apart and then coming back together...it's the same sort of thing that happens when you create static electricity by rubbing your hair with a comb (see triboelectricity). What's incredible is that such intense radiation could come from doing something so simple with such an ordinary everyday material! Better understanding this phenomenon may allow engineers to produce simpler, cheaper, and more energy-efficient X-ray devices.
Here's an article about this from the AP: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jAOxqWhwZlFtsWTQQHllAoDukeRgD93VSQOG0
And here's a video from the Nature website: http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/x-rays/ (I hope you can access it...)

Nobel Prizes

We're excited at the University of Chicago because one of our professors just won a Nobel Prize! Yoichiro Nambu received the Nobel Prize for his theoretical work in particle physics. To be perfectly honest, his contributions to the field are too far above my head for me to even understand, let alone explain. But suffice it to say, he one one of the key contributors to the Standard Model of particle physics and quantum chromodynamics, the theory that deals with interactions between quarks, the exceptionally tiny subatomic particles that make up protons and neutrons. He was also one of the early contributors to string theory.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the people who discovered green fluorescent protein and developed it into a powerful tool for molecular biology (see my posts below). I for one am definitely grateful to them!