This is patently ridiculous. This is right up there that the amount of coconut oil ingested when you buy movie popcorn is enough to kill you.

This will quickly be picked up Fox, and the number "ten" conveniently left off, and it'll become one of those "We're not providing facts, we're just asking a question" stories, like "Could the new Obama Airport Scanners KILL YOU?!??!??!11??!?" We have to tie them to Obama, because like Bush before him to the other side, everything bad that happens in this country is his fault.

There will be someone out there who will claim that any damn fool thing will kill you, if it'll get them on the TV. Cell phones, carbon dioxide, butter, you name it.

You likely get more radiation from the sun on any given day than you do from one of these things.

Anthony Cumia of Opie and Anthony (and yeah, I think you on their show would be one of the most explosive events since the Big Bang) has the most cogent comment - why, in all this frooferau about the scanners, has no one just stood amazed that human being INVENTED X-RAY VISION?

I have to agree with Vinnie here. It's easy to be paranoid about scanners and XRay machines but they are actually pretty harmless in the grand scheme of things.

and for all their cost and "gee-whiz" factor, they'll do precisely dick to prevent terrorist incidents.

If we had responded with a bomb in the center of San'a (I believe that's the capital of Yemen) instead of new shackles upon Americans, I think we'd have sent a better message to terrorists.

Message we want to send: "fuck with us at your peril"

Message we actually sent: "fuck with us and we'll tie ourselves in knots."

It's tough to figure out where to start. I suggest learning about ionizing radiation first - but you MUST be careful: engineering terms have definitions which are importantly different from colloquialisms.

As you might guess from my handle, radioactive waste processing is my profession. In the process, I have noted that a large number of people blow off the subject as too complex to learn, or they use a sort of anti-religion repusion technique to actively avoid learning about a simple subject.

The environment around you is packed with invisible particles, rocketing around at various fractions of the speed of light. You would find this obvious if you knew that everything you see was spit out of a stellar fusion maelstrom at some time in the distant past, or if you had studied the Periodic Table for some time - or took a look at Nuclides and Isotopes, from GE Nuclear Energy -- I think it's at about 720 in the Dewey system at your library.

Anyway. These particles (alpha, beta, gamma, neutron) can and do hit you all the time. When they do, they can:

a) do nothing. Most of you is water.
b) damage a cell, which repairs itself.
c) damage a cell enough that it dies.
d) damage a cell such that it mutates and survives.

A fraction of these last interactions can be cancerous. Now, it's time to talk about the statistics, for one instant.

When authorities talk about "10 cancer deaths (per zillion people)", they are talking about a quantity that must be estimated. The population cannot be tracked, and even if it could, all sorts of other environmental agents cause death - or add other factors bigger than the scanner's beam. Did the lung cancer come from the scanner or two packs a day? Did the car crash take a potential victim out of the pool?

Did you know that even AIDS is not 100% fatal, in that not only do some people fight its effects to a standstill, other agents kill HIV-positive people before the disease does?

Life is not only hell, it's hard to understand!

No exposure is good, but you must know about radiation to evaluate the risk. Reminder: RISK = (probability X consequences).

The last straw should be that the flight itself will expose you to up to a thousand times the scanner's dose.

So, again: the best way to avoid TSA incompetence is not to fly.

This use of scanner technology is an attempt to find the static equilibrium in a dynamic system. Something any engineer can tell you is a recipe for disaster and an exercise in futility.

1. You can try to get blood out of a turnip.
2. You can try to motivate a turnip to give blood.
3. You can empower a turnip to motivate itself to give blood.
4. You can inspire a turnip to empower itself to motivate itself to give blood.
5. You can embolden a turnip to inspire itself to empower itself to motivate itself to give blood.
6. You can ennoble a turnip to embolden itself to inspire itself to empower itself to motivate itself to give blood.

At the end of the process you will have a turnip and no blood.

Dogs. That's the answer.

Have dogs trained in explosive agent detection sniff everyone. As a bonus, it'll keep those repulsed by dogs off planes (three guesses which major groups fall into this category). Plus, dogs have no prurient interest in your dong, unlike the perv who's beating his meat watching all the silhouettes go through the scanner.

Dogs have much lower false-positive rates than any tech that I'm aware of.

And they're a better judge of character than most people.

Plus, they're cute - which doesn't hurt.

Brian has a worthwhile idea.

(Amy, I think you meant to use "effects" in your first sentence. Your affect may have been negatively affected by your sedation, but "iatrogenensis" also covers negative effects that do not involve one's affect, to the best of my knowledge.)

Except the dogs will be handled by those same TSA people Crid so graphically described in another thread. There are already problems:

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/pawprintpost/post/2010/01/bomb-sniffing-dogs-need-to-get-up-to-speed-to-protect-travel-hubs/1

Key paragraph:

In Philadelphia, three of the Travel Security Administration's bomb-sniffing dogs at the Philadelphia International Airport flunked their decertification tests, putting travelers at risk according to this story by Channel 6 Action News in Philadelphia.

unless of course you are very allergic to dogs, which means you naturally give them a wide berth. You could have secondary screening for that. It'd be better than the scanner tech that will cost untold billions and be OBSOLETE the moment it's perfected.

It's simple, this is like people who write viruses for you computer. They ALWAYS come up with somthing new. There isn't a way to figure it out in advance, so you have to keep on the lookout, and then move fast.

Our best bet would be a decent intel network. Yeah, I know how hard that is... especially with all the politics involved, but still.
The second bet is to have basic safeguards in place to avoid making it too easy, and to keep your own criminal element in check.

Bottom line, is you have to ask yourself what it is that the jihadi's are after, and what they care about. They are willing to blow themselves up to get at you. Their goal is to dominate this world, but the footsoldiers don't really care about staying here. In FACT, they feel it would be much better if they didn't, because of the paradise they believe they will go to. That means there is no way to scare them out of this.

The full body scanners wouldn't have prevented Mr. Hates Detroit. It won't be long until these guys are swallowing their pten or whatever the next thing is. How you gonna scan for that?

Oh terrific. Now the hysterics have latched on to something that people are even more paranoid about than terrorism - radiation!

As a nuclear engineer, I might be able to provide a bit of perspective on this subject, though as Raddy has already pointed out, all the information you need is just a click away on Google. As the article says, "The health effect of small doses of radiation is not observed, but inferred from the visible effects of higher doses". The reason for this is that there is nowhere on earth, nowhere in the universe in fact, to get away from the effects of background radiation. Not even inside your own body! Your bones, blood, organs, & muscles are swarming with natural radionuclides, the most prominent of which is Potassium 40.

The average American receives an annual radiation dose of 360 mrem, 80% of which comes from entirely natural sources. You get a dose of about 20 mrem a year just from the Potassium 40 in your body. A typical X-ray delivers about 2 mrem. A chest X-ray delivers about 10, a dental X-ray less than 1. So if a backscatter scanner delivers 1% of the dose from a dental X-ray, then even if you went through scanners at airports twice a day EVERY day all year long, you would still pick up only a fraction of the dose you get from your own bones, and your total annual exposure would be only 2% higher than that of your fellow unscanned citizens. In some places in Brazil, India, & Iran with very high concentrations of thorium & radium in the soil, people get background radiation doses over 50 times higher than the average American, without any statistically significant effects on their health or life expectancy.

Does that calm your nerves a bit?

Martin - it's not the radiation that bothers us (or at least most of us), it's the fact that we're essentially rendered naked for a government employee.

If you wouldn't willingly take off your clothes for these people, why should you allow them to do it for you?

Why indeed.

My blurb on radiation was aimed at Amy, who seems to have an unwarranted fear of dental X-rays.

As for the security theater, it bothers me too. If I had a 12-year old daughter, the thought of some minimum-wage pervert in a TSA uniform itching to get a view of what she looks like under her clothes so he can beat his meat would bother me enough to want to kill someone.

Heh.

The solution to concerns about pedophilia will be to exempt children from the scanner.

Just watch. It'll happen, thus rendering the scanner useless.

I don't really care whether FOX News blames 0b0z0, or whether CNN blames the legacy of Jorge Arbusto, who oversaw creation of the gaggle of Barney Fifes known as the TSA. All I know is that I'm not going to spend time wailing and moaning about the amount of radiation received in a full body scan. I am concerned that the terrorists will simply resort to smuggling bomb parts in unmentionable bodily orifices if this measure is implemented, however.

Radwaste and Martin, I'd like to ask you about an article I'm seeing here and there, published in Technology Review-

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24331/

"Alexandrov and co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they've found is remarkable. They say that although the forces generated are tiny, resonant effects allow THz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. That's a jaw dropping conclusion.

And it also explains why the evidence has been so hard to garner. Ordinary resonant effects are not powerful enough to do do this kind of damage but nonlinear resonances can. These nonlinear instabilities are much less likely to form which explains why the character of THz genotoxic
effects are probabilistic rather than deterministic, say the team.

This should set the cat among the pigeons. Of course, terahertz waves are a natural part of environment, just like visible and infrared light. But a new generation of cameras are set to appear that not only record terahertz waves but also bombard us with them. And if our exposure is set to increase, the question that urgently needs answering is what level of terahertz exposure is safe. "

Conspiracy theorists have latched onto it, and are posting it with topic headers like 'AIRPORT SCANNERS DESTROY DNA!!!!!'

I'd like an opinion from someone who knows what they are talking about :-)

I am confused. Wouldn't items swallowed or stuffed up would-be terrorists show up on these scans?

And Amy and every woman here. Fear of radiation aside, get those mammograms regularly after whatever age you decide is reasonable.

Don't panic, Crella!

THz waves are emitted by everything warmer than minus 440 degrees Fahrenheit. That includes you. The Los Alamos scientists did not observe DNA in the process of being damaged by THz waves. Previous researchers had observed DNA damage in tissues exposed to it. No one could explain how waves with such low energy could do this damage. What the scientists in the Technology Review story proposed was a hypothesis to account for it. As yet, no one has actually observed this proposed mechanism at work, and no one has caught THz waves red-handed in the act of damaging DNA. THz waves can't pass through metal, so if your friends are still worried, tell them to put on tinfoil hats & wrap themselves in aluminum foil:)

MomofRae, THz waves can't pass through water, either, and your body is mostly water, so the scanners that use them can't see very far through tissue. Not far enough to see internal explosives.

Thank you, Martin.

Nicely said, Martin!

-----

You'll note that some items of clothing will now have to be prohibited because of their ability to interfere with scanners.

I wonder if the mouth-breathers who strip-searched Joe Foss for carrying his Medal of Honor will understand anything they see on the scanner. Magicians will tell you their job is made a lot easier by the audience's tendency to watch their hot assistant.

------

You are a meat animal for wanting to fly, and the next step is to track you to your pen and see what you are doing there.

Acctually radwaste if you own a private plane in addition to your flight plan you must now also give - the name of any passangers, their dates of birth, their social security numbers and the reason for your movement around the counrty

Ah, lujlp, no. And there is no way to enforce this. In fact, "flight plans" are not even mandatory for general aviation travel, except to certain airports which have restrictions on landing and takeoff slots.

The private plane, hated as it is by those who cannot imagine such a luxury, is another easy target for those who make it their business to tell you what to do, and assume that if you have something, it must be to kill others.

Federal Aviation Regulations are public records, available on-line.

I might have misread the article - perhaps it was only being proposed

I'll have to see if I can find it

Do read about hormesis. Small doses of radiation are beneficial. As an example: people living in high altitude states (and hence receiving more radiation) have lower cancer rates than those living at lower altitudes. The negatives begin to outweigh the positives at around 10-times the normal background radiation.

Yes, radiation causes cancer, but it also rouses the body's defenses. Will low-level radiation causes 10 cases of cancer? Maybe? But it will then have awakened the immune systems of 20 other people, who will then not die of cancer.

Of course, radiation has been turned into such an exaggerated evil that people are terrified of it. The idea that a bit of radiation can be good for you is generally greeted with emotional disbelief. The statistics are there, as are the research papers.

I've just come across an interesting post in another blog by someone who knows about these backscatter scanners. He points out that the sample pictures provided in the media always show low-resolution, inverted pictures. This is a deliberate attempt to make the images look more acceptable. In fact, the machines do not need to use inverted colors and the resolution is quite good.

A low-res color-inverted sample

The sample without color inversion. Modesty spots added by hand - if you want to see her the way TSA will (only their resolution is a lot higher), just invert the colors in the first picture yourself.

The TSA blokes in the back room will be having fun with your daughter's picture...

Finally found the original source of the pictures above. The original image (link in the article) comes from a very reputable German publication.

While looking for this, I was amazed by the almost complete lack of sample scanner images available in the internet. Clearly, the manufacturers do not want the general public to know just how much the scanners really see.

Meanwhile, here's what the TSA guys will be watching unless Amy's in the picture.

By the way, there's no way the article on hormesis says what you claim. Read all of it. It's homeopathy, with the advantage to supporters that you can't measure the substance and prove it's just water.

Go looking for cancer cases among Federal radiation workers.

The idea that I can shoot you, just a little bit, and make you stronger just means you don't know what radiation does.

There is no vaccination against bullets, which is all that radiation represents: the deposition of energy due to impact, in this case of a particle or wave.

To clarify: the "immune system" does not have a defense against damage. It has one against intrusion, by viral and bacterial agents. Individual cells, not the immune system, carry the burden of carrying on after radiative impact.

To support hormesis, you must show the mechanism which follows the death or mutation of a cell to be beneficial - and how it is both beneficial and carrying on differently from before damage occurred. The controversy means that this has not been shown yet. Be my guest!

To support hormesis, you must show the mechanism which follows the death or mutation of a cell to be beneficial - and how it is both beneficial and carrying on differently from before damage occurred. The controversy means that this has not been shown yet. Be my guest!

You and Radwaste are correct: the mechanism is not understood. But there may be more here than snake oil, and the truth of something does not depend on our ability to understand it. Note that there is a lot of difference between the kinds of radiation experience from living at high altitudes vs. working with radioactive materials vs. getting a dental x-ray.

If you told a 1950's mother she should make sure her house was not too clean, she would have said you were nuts. Nowadays, it is well accepted that kids can be kept too clean: early challenges to the immune system are essential for its proper development. The immune system also has the job of detecting and eliminating defective cells. Perhaps a similar mechanism is at work?

Regarding the pictures I linked to earlier: it turns out that the magazine apparently also could not find any real scanner pictures, so they photoshopped one. Google for "body 360 site:f1online.de" (without the quotes), and the first link takes you to the image collection. Does anyone have a source of actual scanner pictures?

"Does anyone have a source of actual scanner pictures?"

If you want an idea of the resolution available from an ordinary THz scanner, here's a scanned image of a dry leaf:

http://fplreflib.findlay.co.uk/articles/17506/Dry%20leaf.jpg

Article from which leaf scan was taken:

http://www.eurekamagazine.co.uk/article/17506/Measuring-the-moisture.aspx

Rad said: To support hormesis, you must show the mechanism which follows the death or mutation of a cell to be beneficial - and how it is both beneficial and carrying on differently from before damage occurred.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "mechanism that follows", but certainly cell death is beneficial...that is the point of radiotherapy in treating cancer, for example.

One of the problems with radiation or chemotherapy in treating cancer is that only the cells susceptible to the treatment die. The resistant cells go on to create a new tumor which cannot be treated and metastasize. Using the same analogy, one could propose a "survival of the fittest" scheme, where, under low doses of radiation, only genetically robust cells survive and go on to multiply. It is an evolutionary truism that radiation, background or otherwise, (or anything, really) promotes the growth of resistant cells. Therefore, the scanners could be selecting for radiation resistant cells, which could be good or bad, depending on how you look at it (cancer cells or normal cells).

However, the safe dose must be determined, which is especially important considering the known ability of radiation to mutate individual cells. This was a controversial subject back when I took Gen. Chem. and here we are discussing it today. I will mention that I am a synthetic chemist involved in drug discovery, but have no special expertise on radiation therapy.

As for a beneficial effects of radiation outside of evolution, it is not obvious to me in mammalian, non-photosynthetic systems. Other than producing vitamin D.

Nice topic, though. Thanks for your posts (to Martin as well).

"Note that there is a lot of difference between the kinds of radiation experience from living at high altitudes vs. working with radioactive materials vs. getting a dental x-ray."

This is so much nonsense. I urge you to find a copy of Nuclides and Isotopes, by GE Nuclear Energy, so that you may understand what it is you're talking about.

You simply don't.

Fundamentally, supporting evidence consists of a series of observations, with stated conditions, which describes the process in such a manner as to support the conclusion. At no point is a result merely granted when there's a "we don't know" -- especially when the "don't know" includes the fundamentals of radiation.

There is simply no way for you to build "resistance" to radiation from being exposed to it. Cell division isn't selected in an evolutionary process, either - reproduction rate, a measure of cellular chemical activity, is the single, most obvious measure of susceptibility to radiation exposure. A cell engaged in mitosis has a much larger cross-section for ionization interference with the process, said ionization being the effect of impinging radiation (which does not care what its source was), than one which is not.

Now, think about this. Really. Go find out about the physics before confirmation bias has you nodding at Jenny McCarthy for something.

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