By Peter Weiss
Instead of nostalgia, perhaps it was uncanny foresight that led some people to keep their obsolete long-playing records all these years. A team of Swedish and American scientists has now put a new spin on the old platters—using them to focus X rays, on the cheap.
The inventors aim to employ their novel LP-based lens to make X rays converge in an innovative mammography machine. They speculate that the lens’ combination of rock-bottom price, decent performance, and easily adjustable focal length may make it attractive for other medical applications as well. Versions made of materials tougher than vinyl may even prove useful for large electron-accelerator-based X-ray sources known as synchrotrons, they say.