Using X-ray Radiography To Reveal Ancient Insects

1shooter writes "Researchers in France are using a synchrotron as a giant X-ray machine to peer into the insides of opaque amber to reveal insects dating from the age of dinosaurs. 'The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, produces an intense, high-energy light that can pierce just about any material, revealing its inner structure... From more than 600 blocks, they have identified nearly 360 fossil animals: wasps, flies, ants, spiders.' The process reveals detailed 3D images that can be used to make near-perfect enlarged scale models of the bugs using a 'plastic printer.'"

Holotype

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

A very interesting sidelight of this is that they "print" a 3d model of the data in plastic, and this model becomes part of the official holotype of the new species. A first for taxonomy, I believe. A 1 mm wasp gets turned into a highly detailed 30 cm model. Very cool, at least if you're a biologist.

Just an educated guess, they run Linux.

[gnutoo]

HPC is pretty much Linux dominated and you need some serious horsepower to do 1000 angle sinogram backprojection of cm sized volumes with micron sized beams. A cubic cm would have 10E4 x 10E4 x 10E4 voxels, each with 10E3 angles. Hubba, hubba. They will also have to apply some kind of filtering to each sinogram and probably have to tweak that filter multiple times on lower resolution scans to get it right, and they want to do several a day. I've seen Microsoft clusters choke on networking problems for much less challenging work.

Re:How many furlongs is that?

[jd]

That and x-ray purity, and a highly controllable coherent source (you can set the energy to what you like), one ring can have hundreds of outlets whereas one laser has one, and they are Seriously Geeky.

Re:Holotype

[ortholattice]

The 3-D printing I've heard about builds up the model layer by layer. One thing I don't understand is how they "print" the legs, antennae, etc., since these (if pointing downwards) would have to be suspended in mid-air until the layers that attach them are printed, i.e. they would fall off. So do they print these separately then glue them on?

One thing I would like to see is the following. Even though I've never heard of it, it is possible that this has been thought of and/or patented. But if not, this post documents the idea here first as prior art, which I contribute to the public domain. Or if it has been thought of, kudos to the inventor.

The printer would start with a solid block of a mostly transparent, wax-like or plastic-like substance with a low melting point. When a focused laser beam or other focused source of energy is applied to a point (voxel) inside the block, the plastic in that voxel will "cure" i.e. harden. Perhaps it is the temperature that causes the hardening, or perhaps it is the action of a UV light like they do to cure fillings at the dentist. After all voxels constituting the model are scanned, the whole block is heated up (to below the curing point but higher than the melting point), and the uncured substance will melt away from the model for reuse in the next model.

With this method, you could even have hollow models by curing the voxels in a shell at the surface of the model, then leaving a hole at the bottom for the uncured substance to melt out of. This would save money if the strength of a solid model isn't needed. This shell could even be paper-thin if you just want a quick if fragile visual idea of what's going to be "printed", then strengthen it for the final version.

I'm sure there would be many technical hurdles to overcome, not the least of which is finding a suitable substance with the properties I described.