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This news is really old. The use of scotch tape to create a particle accelerator out of a pencil is not: http://www.deccanherald.com/content/104044/promise-gra

• scott_s 16y ago
  When reporting science, it's often not useful to start off with the newest thing. Doing so presumes the reader knew about the old thing, which of often not the case. Hence, the new thing is a few paragraphs in: To track where the X-rays travel, Australian scientists rigged up Scotch tape on a spool driven by a motor (the lab’s first prototype spun on an electric drill). The X-rays mostly sprayed at a right angle to the direction the tape was pulled, the researchers report in the Sept. 29 Applied Physics Letters. That’s a convenient property, because herding light into a straight line normally absorbs the light’s energy, but the tape naturally emits X-rays in a straight line to within 5 degrees. “Tape is an even better use as an X-ray source than we thought,” says Putterman, who first observed the phenomenon and reported in May that bremsstrahlung radiation is the X-ray source in a May paper in Applied Physics B: Lasers and Optics.