 Hello, welcome back. We're going to talk about the attenuation of x-rays If you look up attenuation the dictionary you get the actual process of attenuating something All the state of being attenuated such as a a lessening in the amount of force magnitude or value Weakening that's the key bits to this here It's about the attenuation of x-rays and the use of attenuation for certain effects now X-rays themselves. They're just a part of the wider electromagnetic spectrum. So if you're looking at the electromagnetic spectrum itself so your visible light is is around here and You know, this this is all sort of non ionizing radiation We start to get up here ultraviolet and this is where it starts to get a bit dodgy because that's where you're gonna get Sunburn and then your x-rays are here. So that's That's up in the dangerous region The key point here is it's not visible light However, it can be seen by certain things and and we take the products of The thing that sees the x-ray and we turn it into something that we can see in visible light So of course x-rays are then able to sort of pierce through objects and depending on whether they're absorbed or scattered You can create images of what is inside those objects So that's why they're incredibly useful to look inside things without having to go inside there yourself You know get an x-ray for your bones without having to do the whole exploratory surgery thing certainly is a little less invasive so x-rays themselves have a Sort of two regions that can be judged as low energy x-rays are called soft x-rays and a high energy x-rays called hard x-rays The higher the energy of the x-ray the more it can penetrate the greater its power Now soft x-rays lower energy x-rays are better looking at soft tissue Higher energy x-rays are better looking at harder tissue or things with heavier nucleases such as Metal atoms and if there's one thing bones carry a lot off. It's calcium There's enough to be able to create an after-effect and that's why you can see the bones in your hand When you show an x-rays on it whilst the soft tissue seems to sort of Disappear and disappear from the image itself one of the great things I've seen is this Fourth amendment t-shirt you can buy with metallic printed ink metal atoms are really good at absorbing x-rays and The way this works is when you go to the airport and they do that whole x-ray scan thing The fourth amendment talks about the right not to be sort of searched and was you know Whole everyone's about their amendment rights in America And so when they do the x-ray scan the fourth amendment comes up on the TSA screen It's your little chance to protest being x-rayed at the airport This is a great image though and that it demonstrates how this works the x-rays are shone through the black there and If he was carrying a gun or anything metal knife, etc. It would show up because it's got metal ions You can see there that the there's a big white area and that that's you know the fourth amendment there That's because the metal is absorbing the x-rays. So all the x-rays that go through calls the image to turn black and Where the x-rays are absorbed the image stays White so it's a sort of a shadow that's cast There's a couple of videos that I'll show you later, which are a great demonstration of this But what you're seeing on the x-ray film or the the image it is produced by digital Receiving instrument is actually the shadow created by things blocking the x-rays causing them to either be absorbed or scattered