Tiny X-rays of Tiny Animals 30
Johnny Vector writes: "Scientists at Cornell have taken X-rays of fruit flies, with enough detail to see the hairs on their wings. The AIP has more photos. They did it with an "X-Pinch" machine: vaporize a wire, the resulting plasma implodes, producing a tiny (1/1000 inch), fast (nanosecond) pulse of X-rays. I want one of those machines."
X-rays from ordinary electrical fuses (Score:3, Interesting)
Any electrical spark of sufficient energy density can generate X-rays as well as emissions in other regions of the EM spectrum, especially visible and UV light. For example, you can also get emissions of X-rays from many types of electrical safety fuses when a massive excess of electrical current causes them to blow.
The X-ray emissions from a fuse are detectable with the help of a well-equipped physics lab. However, the emissions you get are not very useful, being neither of short duration nor a single point source emission. By contrast the researchers at Cornell are using carefully constructed crossed wires which produce extremely short picosecond point-source pulses of X-rays.