We hear a familiar line to those of you who are fellow M. Right now, picture with me, the background of my computer. Clark has his spot back at the Smallville Ledger.Lana and Clark are back on friendly terms.Chloe has a Freak database that Lionel Luthor now controls.Van McNulty has a mad-on for Krypto-freaks (come on.“There are a lot of complementary technologies.” This post originally appeared at Defense One.Superman on Television Smallville: Episode Reviews Season 3 - Episode 3: "Extinction" “It’s one of the first things we thought of for this,” says Reiss. In the meantime, the MINI Z could work with a virtual reality headset like, say, the Oculus Rift to provide a convincing X-ray glasses experience (if an Oculus Rift developer felt up to the task.) The MINIZ uses a lithium ion battery and as improvements are made in battery technology, devices like it should benefit. ![]() There is, however, still opportunity to improve the cost and the size of the unit beyond its current limitations. There is no Moore’s Law for shrinking X-ray tubes in the same way that you can make computers smaller, cheaper and more powerful by doubling the number of transistors you can squeeze onto an integrated circuit. A sufficiently powerful X-ray beam needs tubes of a certain size and power. “Practically speaking, X-ray imaging is fairly mature,“ he says, meaning, essentially, the low-hanging fruit in innovating the technology has already been picked. Unfortunately, says Reiss, those will be a while in coming. While an X-ray blaster is a useful gadget to have on the field, X-ray glasses would be far more so. Consider that in some countries the US military is arming security forces made up of farmers and shepherds who speak no English but are trained to scan cars and people for opium, cash and explosives. That’s key because it’s not necessarily US soldiers that will be using it (though AS&E does count the Defense Department as a customer) so much as the foreign soldiers under US tutelage. It requires almost no training to operate. You turn it on, point, shoot and get an image. But the most important feature, from a national security perspective, is the simplicity of use. ![]() The MINI Z comes in at $50,000, or half the cost of a typical airport backscatter X-ray. How much power do you want? How big can it be? How much does it cost?”įor the military, cost and portability make the MINI Z an attractive new security capability for the Pentagon’s arsenal. “The basic imaging concepts are the same,” said Reiss. The company’s van-sized X-ray machine will use on the order of 3000 watts but can see deeper at further distances. The MINI Z can shoot these rays continuously, as opposed to taking a single burst picture like a Polaroid One Shot.įor instance, the MINI Z uses about ten watts of power. Instead, the photons of the beam hit the surface of organic material and scatter and ricochet, which is detected by a sensor. The photons get hung up on the parts of you that are more atomically dense, like bones or metallic objects.īackscatter X-rays are less powerful and don’t actually penetrate deep into organic tissue. ![]() The photons pass through the soft tissue to a film, which is then developed to reveal fractures, car keys, staples or other abnormalities. ![]() When you go to a doctor’s office with a possible broken rib, the doctor will shoot a high-powered beam of photons through your body. They work in almost the same as regular X-rays. The same company makes the large, toll-booth like backscatter X-rays scanners you walk through at airports – the ones that have given rise to recent controversy because of the embarrassing amount of detail they reveal about a person’s body. Organic compounds appeared bright white and distinct from the dark inorganic material. Representatives from American Science and Engineering, or AS&E would run the X-ray scanner, called the MINI Z, over the item and the image would show up on a Windows powered tablet PC.
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