X-ray

      The chest x-ray came back today, and my lungs are clear. That's good news! The bloodwork isn't back yet, but I should start hearing the results on that tomorrow. I'll let you know.
      Getting an X-ray reminds me of those ads in comic books for X-ray glasses. The ads always showed a guy looking at a girl and seeing her underwear. Makes you wonder what Superman was looking at, doesn't it?
      A bit of history about X-rays: On Nov, 8, 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was studying a piece of equipment called a Crooke's tube. During an experiment, he noticed that a fluorescent screen across the room started to glow strangely. The glow appeared to be caused by some unknown rays coming from the tube. He attempted to block the rays with cardboard, but the screen continued to glow. Then he made an amazing discovery: If he put his hand between the tube and the screen, he could see an image of the bones in his hand.
      He named this new form of radiation "X-radiation" (X standing for unknown) and immediately realised how important this would be for medicine and science.
      A week later, he took an X-ray photo of his wife Anna Bertha's hand that clearly showed her wedding ring and her bones. The photograph excited incredible interest in the public and the scientific community. For discovering X-rays, Röntgen received the first Nobel prize in Physics in 1901.
      X-ray images, those black and white films that you see on CSI so much, are created by the way that different tissues absorb X-rays. Calcium in bones absorbs X-rays the most, so bones look white on an X-ray image. Fat and other soft tissues absorb less, and look gray. Air absorbs the least, so lungs look black. (My lungs looked perfectly black, a good thing.)
      And that concludes our Mr. Science lesson for the day. Take care and have a great tomorrow.