Posted on 01/06/2010 11:48:51 AM PST by decimon
Amid concerns regarding terrorists targeting airliners using weapons less detectable by traditional means, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is ramping up deployment of whole body scanners at security checkpoints in U.S. airports. These systems produce anatomically accurate images of the body and can detect objects and substances concealed by clothing.
To date, TSA has deployed two types of scanning systems:
Millimeter wave technology uses low-level radio waves in the millimeter wave spectrum. Two rotating antennae cover the passenger from head to toe with low-level RF energy.
Backscatter technology uses extremely weak X-rays delivering less than 10 microRem of radiation per scan ─ the radiation equivalent one receives inside an aircraft flying for two minutes at 30,000 feet.
An airline passenger flying cross-country is exposed to more radiation from the flight than from screening by one of these devices. The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement (NCRP) has reported that a traveler would need to experience 2,500 backscatter scans per year to reach what they classify as a Negligible Individual Dose. The American College of Radiology (ACR) agrees with this conclusion.
The ACR is not aware of any evidence that either of the scanning technologies that the TSA is considering would present significant biological effects for passengers screened.
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The ACR encourages those interested in learning more regarding radiation associated with imaging and radiation oncology procedures as well as radiation naturally occurring in the Earth's atmosphere to visit www.radiologyinfo.org.
For more information or to speak to an ACR spokesperson, please contact ACR Director of Public Affairs Shawn Farley at 703-648-8936 or sfarley@acr-arrs.org.
Negligible Individual Dose ping.
I wonder who is willing to have their 13 year old or younger daughter or son go through these scanners? There has to be a better way.
And it still won’t prevent someone like the Flight 253 from getting on board. This is just so completely nuts
Lots of German shepherds would be the better option.
The new rules will only get the TSA closer to their worst nightmare:
“I’ll have to inspect your colostomy bag, ma’am.”
The evidence that terahertz radiation damages biological systems is mixed. "Some studies reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, showed none," say Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a few buddies. Now these guys think they know why.I strongly advise sticking to airport terminals with x-ray scanners until it can be determined whether these new technology scanners (millimeter wave, or terahertz) machines are actually unzipping DNA.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.
Start with the children of the ACR leaders, their spouses and themselves. On FOX News.
Yeah. Drive.
Not willing to have my wife go thru them either. Her contours are my business, not some anonymous TSA agent’s.
Here is a Link to the cited study.
It doesn't say how high.
I’m going to give you and all tera-hertz loving boffins a friggin big word of warning -— life on Earth did not develop in the presence of any significant level of millimeter length radiation. If you are evo that should scare you because no defense and repair mechanisms would have evolved. If you are creo or ider that will scare you even more — because the Designer is likely to have had a real good reason to ensure this green Earth had almost no radiation in that band.
Tera-hertz radiation in any significant levels is new. Very new. From the mid-nineteen-nineties. Most less than that.
YOU DO NOT KNOW THE LONG TERM EFFECT, NOR HAVE WIDE POPULATION STUDIES ON EXPOSURES TO MEASURABLE LEVELS OF THIS NEW FORM OF RADIATION.
Just how long did it take for Marie Curie to get sick? Years. She and her husband both died from what they believed to be new scientific miracle. It was. It is also dangerous, used improperly -— Radium. People bought millions of does of Radium elixirs from the 1910’s onward — the AMA insisted on a high standard dose to get it’s approval.
With the nuclear age of the late forties and fifties we finally got around to really understanding rad effects. It wasn’t until the 1960’s that personal items using radium were banned.
Use of x-rays has really improved since the 1980’s — extremely efficient detectors, highly tunable low-power emitters.
There’s no good reason to rush full public exposure to the as yet not well studied tera-hertz radiation band.
Well said.
If you are willing to let them get on an airplane, there is no reason to not allow them to go through the scanner. Their dose from the scanner is a very small fraction of the dose they get from cosmic rays at 30k feet.
Another question on these scanners - couldn't the terrorists form the bomb material into something anatomically inconspicuous, or do they show the composition of what they scan?
Yes. They could. They can mix something up in liquid or powder form.
They could even wear a shirt with a nitro-cellulose collar or some other explodable material made into a fabric. Ir fabricate more explosively formulated rolls of film. I seem to remember that the chemistry that makes film photoactive can be modified to make it an explosive, yet still a passable film.
They could carry non-binary explosives up their butt beyond the range of the tera-hertz scanner and back-scatter x-rays.
Or swallow it in a condom like drug mule and poop it out during the flight. Or have it inserted into a sinus cavity like some Name era booby traps.
They have gotten smarter. The scanning equipment will not stop them. We have to profile, we have to wipe out the places terrorists congregate freely and train. We have to shut down the religious teachings of hatred — because that is an act of war.
We have to go Israeli, hire and train SMART security people to interview those on line and scout suspects in the terminal areas for random interviews and follow-up observations.
But we are American, we also have to invent non-debasing methods of scanning and sampling to make up for the our inability to go full Israeli. But mostly we have to go OFFENSE on them, and take them out before they get to the points of embarcation and areas of assembly. That’s what Israel can’t do and we can.
Have you ever used Scotch or packing tape? Incadescent or flourescent lighting? If so, then you've been exposed to Terahertz waves in quantities far in excess of these scanners.
Incandescent or florescent lighting: You have some cites? Doesn’t make sense that it would be a higher dose — a super wattage incandescent bulb maybe. But in proximity to areas of the body normally covered by clothing?
Air is opaque to terahertz, and we are talking dosage at exposed surface. While terahertz might be higher at the filament, there’s always plenty of air between skin and source.
I remember you are the one hung up on “ionizing” effects — I mean you tried already to gloss over bio-hazard by saying terahertz is non-ionizing. So what? Like microwaves are also non-ionizing yet on the weak polar bonds between water molecules they’ll cook you to death by resonance.
I’ll bet there are a lot more bio-molecules that absorb resonant energy from tera hertz radiation than yet we yet know, and that some of those will have some very strange and mutagenic effect.
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