Colour X-ray machine, page 1

Big brother is watching you, and your clothes, and your skin, bones, organs and anybody else's organs if you happen to be carrying any.

This is the latest brainchild of a system gone wrong.

Ok, it could be good for medical stuff, saves them cutting you open i guess, but you can just see the justifications for using it in every airport, train/bus station, shopping center, high street bank.... even the kids play grounds at schools, scanning for illegal candies.

A colour X-ray machine that can detect the chemical make-up as well as the structure and shape of a sample has been demonstrated by UK researchers. They say the new technique could be better at spotting smuggled substances or abnormal body tissue.

Regular X-ray machines and CT scanners can produce images in 2 or 3D, but only in monochrome. In the same way that black-and-white film is blind to other wavelengths of light, these techniques cannot distinguish between different wavelengths of X-ray.

"We have miniaturised a detector that can differentiate those different wavelengths," says Robert Cernik, a materials scientist at Manchester University, UK, who developed the device with colleagues Kern Hauw Khor and Conny Hansson.