August 2025 – Page 4 – Peter's Quasi-Daily Blah-g

Despite the best of intentions, travelers aren’t always in the clearest headspace when making a mad dash to the airport. So although we theoretically know the rules, plenty of passengers have a story of a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer spotting something mortifying in their carry-on. The snafus range from embarrassing—a buzzing vibrator that sounds like a potential bomb threat—to stressful—cannabis products purchased legally, then accidentally carried into a state or country where they carry criminal charges.

Some of these prohibited items seem pretty obvious, but others beg the question, How the heck did they know that was in there? If you’ve ever caught a glimpse of the squiggly, multicolored visual display on the X-ray scanner as you trudge to the body scanner, you may have found yourself wondering exactly how much information the Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) can decipher from it.

A lot, as it turns out. If you have a pile of money or a container of pills in there, they’re gonna know. Ditto any electronics or, more importantly, any items sneakily hidden inside of them.

That’s a good thing, since TSA agents pick up a whole lot of hazardous stuff, including knives, guns, and explosives. “Prohibited items brought to checkpoints add up to hundreds of pounds a year at smaller airports to as much as 2,000 pounds or a ton per month at the largest airports,” says a TSA spokesperson. According to the administration, last year the government agency screened more than 2 billion carry-on bags and 494 million checked bags. Here’s how they did it.

How it works

Since 2002, when the TSA leveled up in the wake of September 11, virtually all agents have relied on Computed Tomography (CT) systems. “CT is a proven and highly effective screening technology that is widely used in the medical field,” says a TSA Spokesperson.

Essentially, a TSA CT X-ray scanner sends low doses of X-rays through your luggage, which pass through the different materials at different rates. So the scanner can tell if there are metals, liquids, or even organic materials in there.

“CT technology applies sophisticated algorithms and creates three-dimensional images by gathering hundreds of pictures with an X-ray camera spinning around the items,” says a TSA Spokesperson. “The images can be rotated 360 degrees on three axes, allowing for more detailed visual analysis by Transportation Security Officers and the detection of a broader range of threats without having to open the bag.”

Although the basic concept has remained the same, the tech is vastly more sophisticated these days. That’s a big part of why this year the TSA finally decided to let travelers keep their stinky feet shod while going through security. In fact, the newer models of CT scanners are so adept at reading your luggage that you can safely leave your laptops in your carry-on. Some can even tell if the liquids in your luggage contain explosives. While those aren’t widely available yet, there’s hope in the future that we might finally be able to fly with normal-sized shampoo again.

Three knives, a camping axe, a knife hilt designed to look like a bat, and a BMW car key multitool are laid out on a blue surface. — The TSA at Miami International Airport displays confiscated carry-on items, including some very colorful knives. *Image: Joe Raedle / Getty Images* Joe Raedle

What they find in there

“TSA officers encounter everything from fireworks and replica grenades to snakes and literal kitchen sinks,” says a TSA Spokesperson. “Knives, martial arts items and large tools are among the most common items.”

Some of the finds are so outlandish that the TSA started pulling together an annual roundup on their official YouTube channel. For instance, last year, a passenger at Chicago Midway International Airport tried to hide a vape in a tube of toothpaste. In 2023, passengers tried to smuggle a knife in a loaf of bread and a DIY explosive in a soda can. And in 2022, drug mules got creative by putting narcotics in hair scrunchies and Fentanyl in candy.

While ninja throwing stars (yes, really) and pipebombs are obviously out, it’s always a good idea to check the TSA’s guidelines if you’re not sure about a particular item.

Even if you mess up and throw your full-sized skincare routine in your carry-on, don’t stress too much. Agents don’t actually confiscate most prohibited items, so unless you’re channeling Walter White or Tony Montana, you have a good chance of hanging onto them. You’re generally allowed to hand items to a friend or family member at the airport who isn’t boarding with you. Alternatively, you can usually go back to the ticket counter and ask to put it in your checked luggage.

Oh, and it’s an urban myth that TSA officers swipe the fancy bottle of Scotch you bought on the trip for themselves. The majority of the items surrendered (or just forgotten) at airport security actually wind up in a state-sponsored auction on GovDeals.com. Think about it this way: If you’re still mad about losing your favorite shampoo, you can score some terrific deals on everything from kitchen knives to Macbooks. It’s like the airport security circle of life.

The post What do TSA bag scanners actually see? appeared first on Popular Science.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com

August 1, 2025 at 08:00AM

August 1, 2025

The Kindle Colorsoft Will Make Your Books Look Worse

https://lifehacker.com/tech/kindle-colorsoft-makes-books-look-worse

Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft is now the company’s most expensive e-reader (with the exception of the Kindle Scribe, although that’s more of an e-note than an e-reader), but that doesn’t automatically make it the best Kindle money can buy. Let’s say you have the cash to burn and want the best reading experience Amazon offers: If you only read novels, or even black-and-white comics like manga, you might actually be better off saving your money and getting the Kindle Paperwhite instead. Shelling out extra won’t give you an upgraded experience—it could actively make your books worse.

What is a color e-reader?

At its core, the Kindle Colorsoft is essentially a Kindle Paperwhite, but with one key difference. It’s got the same lighting options, weighs just about the same, looks exactly like a Paperwhite, and has the same size screen. The defining factor is that the Colorsoft has a color filter in its display, which allows content that passes through it to produce up to 4,096 colors.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

It can still display black-and-white content, but when you read something like a comic book on it, it cuts the resolution in half from 300 ppi to 150 ppi, then cleverly arranges the pixels so they shine through the exact right spots to produce the needed colors.

There’s a bit more to it than that—Amazon also has some proprietary materials in play that allows it to achieve better color accuracy and fewer artifacts than competing devices—but that’s the gist. It’s pretty clever, even if the core concept isn’t unique to the Kindle Colorsoft. It doesn’t just work on comics, either, but also on things like book covers or color-collated highlighting.

Sounds pretty cool. Even if you don’t use it all the time, it’s a nice bonus, right? You can get color when you need it, at the cost of some resolution, but you can also display black-and-white works at the same resolution as the Kindle Paperwhite. Unfortunately, the reality’s not so cut and dry.

The rainbow effect

While the Kindle’s software can recognize when it’s showing you black-and-white content and when it’s displaying color, the hardware can’t. Even in something like a novel, the physical color filter is still there. And while its individual color dots are too small to make out, your eyes can still notice the color layer as whole.

Enter the rainbow effect. At its best, it’ll put a light shimmer on your screen, giving it a somewhat grainy texture that can lower the contrast. At its worst, it’ll show full on spectrums of color on content that should be monochrome.

Take this page from Dune, which shows a fairly mild rainbow effect.

"Dune" on the Kindle Colorsoft (left) vs. Kindle Paperwhite (right).
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

And this page from Berserk, which shows a more aggressive rainbow pattern.

"Berserk" shown on the Kindle Colorsoft (left) vs. Kindle Paperwhite (right).
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

It’s unavoidable. No matter what you read on the device, it’ll show up to some degree. The question is how you’ll react to it.

Can you fix the rainbow effect?

Because the rainbow effect is a hardware issue, there’s no way to get rid of it completely. The competition has slight fixes for it, with the most notable being Kobo’s “reduce rainbow effect” toggle, which slightly blurs the image to try to line it up in a way that the color filter isn’t as noticeable. Amazon, unfortunately, has not opted to include such a solution on its device.

That said, the Kindle Colorsoft does ship with two color modes, standard and vivid. These won’t affect black-and-white content, but it’s worth noting that the way the color filter works in the Colorsoft can sometimes cause artifacting in color content as well. If you notice this, changing color modes could help you out. The Kindle is less prone to artifacting than I’ve seen on other devices, but its Vivid mode doesn’t use the full range of 4,096 colors, instead compressing it to boost saturation. Most of the fellow Colorsoft users I’ve spoken with prefer to swap over to Vivid and leave it on for everything, but the lower range of colors can cause pixelation, so if you notice that, it’s worth trying out Standard mode again. Sure, this isn’t exactly the same as the rainbow effect, but it’s a similar enough issue, and points out that even color users aren’t free from problems on this device.

Is dealing with the rainbow effect worth it?

How much the rainbow effect will bother you depends on what you read and how pristine you like your pages to look. To my husband, who reads all of his black-and-white books on a color e-reader, it doesn’t bother him much. He actually kind of likes the shimmering, saying it kind of looks like the grain you might get on real paper.

But to me, I can’t stand it. It’s bright and distracting, and if you spend most of your time on your Kindle reading traditional books, buying a Colorsoft will mean you’ll be paying extra just to have to deal with that. I suppose that might be worth it if you want to see your book covers in color when scrolling through your library, or if you highlight a lot. It does look nice, for the few seconds covers or highlights are on your screen. But for most of your time actually reading, you’re not going to be using the color, and you will be seeing the rainbow effect.

The news only gets worse if you read black-and-white illustrated works, like manga. To follow along with a book, all you have to do is make out the words— but with manga, the artwork will be actively worsened. Lines might look fuzzier, or facial expressions might give off an entirely different vibe underneath all the shimmering. But worst of all, you might get those unintended splotches of color, like I got in Berserk. To me, that’s not worth it.

The Kindle Colorsoft is only for people who read color content

It might sound obvious, but the Kindle Colorsoft is only for people who read color content regularly, like comic books—and even then, I don’t recommend it.

This isn’t like the ‘90s, when the Game Boy Color could play certain games in color, but could also play black-and-white games the same as an original Game Boy. The Kindle Colorsoft is not just a regular Kindle with optional color that readers with deep pockets can count on as an occasional added bonus, but as something they can otherwise ignore. Instead, using it is an entirely different experience.

via Lifehacker https://ift.tt/1oIF94p

July 31, 2025 at 04:25PM

August 1, 2025

Einstein was wrong (slightly) about quantum physics, new version of the famous double-slit experiment reveals

https://www.space.com/astronomy/einstein-was-wrong-slightly-about-quantum-physics-new-version-of-the-famous-double-slit-experiment-reveals

For over 100 years, quantum physics has taught us that light is both a wave and a particle. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have performed a daring experiment using single atoms that confirms that, while light can behave as either a particle or a photon, it cannot be seen to behave as both at the same time.

The debate about the nature of light goes back centuries, to the 17th century and the time of Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens. Some, like Newton, believed that light had to be made from particles to explain why mirror images are sharp and our inability to see around corners. And yet, Huygens and others pointed out, light exhibits wave-like behavior, such as diffraction and refraction.

In 1801, the physicist Thomas Young devised the famous double-slit experiment, where he shone a coherent light source through two narrow slits and onto a wall. If light were a particle, we would expect two overlapping spots of light to appear on the wall as different photons pass through each of the two slits. Instead, what Young found was that the light was spread out on the wall in alternating interference patterns of light and dark. This could only be explained if light waves were spreading out from each slit and interacting with one another, resulting in constructive and destructive interference.

A century later, Max Planck showed that heat and light are emitted in tiny packets called quanta, and Albert Einstein showed that a quantum of light is a particle called a photon. What’s more, quantum physics showed that photons also display wave-like behavior. So Newton and Huygens had both been correct: light is both a wave and a particle. We call this bizarre phenomenon wave-particle duality.

Yet the uncertainty principle states that we can never observe a photon acting as both a wave and a particle at the same time. The father of quantum physics, Niels Bohr, called this "complementarity," in the sense that complementary properties of a quantum system, such as behaving like a wave and a particle, can never be simultaneously measured.

Einstein was never a lover of the randomness that complementarity and the uncertainty principle introduced into the laws of nature. So he looked for ways to disprove complementarity, and in doing so he went back to Young’s classic double-slit experiment. He argued that, as a photon passes through one of the slits, the sides of the slit should feel a small force as they are "rustled" by the passing photon. In this way, we could simultaneously measure the light acting as a photon particle as it moves through a slit, and as a wave when interacting with other photons.

Bohr disagreed. The uncertainty principle describes how, for example, we cannot know a photon’s momentum and its exact position — both complementary properties — at the same time. Therefore, said Bohr, measuring the "rustling" of the passing photon would only result in scrubbing out the wave-like behavior, and the interference pattern produced by the double-slit experiment would be replaced with just two bright spots.

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Experiments over the years have shown Bohr to be correct, but there’s always been the small, nagging doubt that bulky apparatus could introduce effects that mask seeing light as a wave and a particle simultaneously.

A basic depiction of the standard doubler-slit experiment that you might have performed in school science lessons. (Image credit: Future)

To address this, the MIT team, led by physicists Wolfgang Ketterle and Vitaly Fedoseev, pared the double-slit experiment down to the most basic apparatus possible, at the atomic scale. Using lasers, they arranged 10,000 individual atoms cooled to just fractions of a degree above absolute zero. Each atom acted like a slit, in the sense that photons could scatter off them in different directions and over many trials produce a pattern of light and dark areas, based on the likelihood that a photon will be scattered in certain directions more than others. In this way, the scattering produces the same diffraction pattern as the double-slit experiment.

"What we have done can be regarded as a new variant to the double-slit experiment," said Ketterle in a statement. "These single atoms are like the smallest slits you could possibly build."

The experiment showed that Bohr was definitely correct when he argued for complementarity, and that Einstein had got it wrong. The more atom-rustling that was measured, the weaker the diffraction pattern became, as those photons that were measured as particles no longer interfered with the photons that hadn’t been measured to be particles.

The experiments also showed that the apparatus — in this case the laser beams holding the atoms in place — did not affect the results. Ketterle and Fedoseev’s team were able to switch off the lasers and make a measurement within a millionth of a second of doing so, before the atoms had a chance to jiggle about or move under gravity. The result was always the same — light’s particle and wave nature could not be simultaneously discerned.

"What matters is only the fuzziness of the atoms," said Fedoseev. This fuzziness refers to the quantum fuzziness that surrounds an atom’s exact position, as per the uncertainty principle. This fuzziness can be tuned by how firmly the lasers hold the atoms in position, and, the more fuzzy and loosely held the atoms are, the more they feel the photons rustling them, therefore revealing light as a particle.

"Einstein and Bohr would have never thought that this is possible, to perform such an experiment with single atoms and single photons," said Ketterle.

The experiment further cements the weirdness of quantum physics, in which particles have a dual nature, and we can never simultaneously measure complementary properties such as whether light is a wave or a particle, or the position and momentum of that particle. The universe seems to operate on the basis of probability, and the emergent properties that we see coming from the quantum realm are only the manifestation of statistics involving very many particles, all of which, to Einstein’s chagrin, "play dice."

The research was published on July 22 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

via Latest from Space.com https://www.space.com

July 31, 2025 at 04:01PM

Month: August 2025

What do TSA bag scanners actually see?

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