A coworker pointed me to this link today: news.co.au.

The long and short of this is a rediscovery that separating Scotch tape at the right speed, X-Rays are emitted at a powerful enough voltage to take images. The Soviets in the 1950s documented this research, but with a lot of things the Soviets did, it was lost to time. Remember internal combustion run-assist robot legs? No? It worked, but it had a tendency to wear knee-caps out much faster than normal.

The Russians applied research division was spectacular. I don’t have any hard numbers in front of me, but I imagine it was a lot like DARPA with a shoestring budget. Basically, a bunch of brilliant Russian MacGyvers went to the junkyard every day to see what they could come up with. Because they were all geniuses (geniii?), they came up with Scotch tape X-Rays, flying saucers (yes), and disturbing dog heads.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult because they’re all dying off, but put a Soviet scientist on a team and you will come up with some really cool and hacked together tech. Remember Junkyard Wars on Discovery Channel? The Russian team made the ricketiest shit, but it almost always worked better than the other teams’ contraptions. My favorite part of the Russian team is they had old C.C.C.P. patches and logos on their clothes. Hard. Core. What seems to make the Russians great is they tend to engineer only what is necessary and nothing more.

The odd thing about what they build, is it can take a beating, have non-trivial bits fall off and still be functional. Look at the Mir space station for example. This hunk of junk surprised us Westerners at almost every turn. This ramshackle beast of an orbiter stayed up for 15 years (original launch in 1986, fully assembled 1996, and de-orbited 2001).