Music has always had the power to transcend social and political borders, and eager listeners have always found creative ways to satisfy their need for melodic escape. But few methods were as ingenious as the one used by people in the Soviet Union who were denied the privilege of listening to Western music like jazz and rock.

Clever bootleggers began pressing their own records as early as the 1930s. The practice seemed to explode in popularity in the 1950s. However, due to material shortages and the covert nature of the pressings, bootleggers had to look for creative materials on which to store the forbidden sounds. They turned to a surprising source that was both free and readily available: discarded X-ray films fished from hospital dumpsters.

Using a special device to replicate the scarce few contraband records that made it into the USSR, records were pressed directly onto the X-rays. The music-playing grooves could only be pressed into one side of the X-rays and the sound quality was quite low – but the “bone music,” as the records came to be known, fulfilled a need for culture from other parts of the world.

The finished records were cut into crude circles with scissors, a label was affixed, and a cigarette made the central hole that would allow the records to play on a standard turntable. The results were oddly compelling. Here were two types of completely different media laid one atop the other: a picture of a broken bone, or a mass in a lung, or a cracked rib, would play the music that was so sought after in the isolated reaches of the USSR. The industry grew quickly, and the X-ray Press, or roentgenizdat, was producing millions of bone music records.

Authorities were alerted to the underground bone music industry and by 1958 the bootleg records were made illegal. They remain an important part of history, however, and some of the actual records can be found today in the sound archives of the Hungarian Radio. Photographer József Hajdú added a third layer of media to the already-complex bone records by photographing them to share the story of illegal bone music with the rest of the modern world.

The post How Used X-Rays Brought Banned US Music to the USSR first appeared on Gajitz.

Photographer Brendan Fitzpatrick has a keen eye for what’s inside of ordinary items. In his new series, he uses an x-ray machine to capture a unique aspect of sweet plastic childhood toys.

Fitzpatrick’s unusual images answer the childhood questions many of us had about what’s inside our favorite toys: wires, batteries, screws, lots of plastic, some light bulbs, and some miscellaneous electronic bits.

Using x-rays in place of traditional camera images gives the mundane objects an otherworldly spin. They are no longer brightly colored plastic playthings; they become lovely, ethereal things with a slight air of mystery about them.

Fitzpatrick’s other x-ray series include flowers and creatures. While the images are taken directly from standard x-ray machines, the photographer uses artificial coloring to emphasize and differentiate different parts of each object. More of Brandan Fitzpatrick’s stunning work can be found on his Behance profile.

The post Peek Inside the Plastic: Ethereal X-Ray Images of Toy Guts first appeared on Gajitz.

The lunar space program captivated the American public for more than a decade, ending in 1972 with the Apollo 17 making the final landing. The suits the astronauts wore in those glory days were recently on display (sort of) at the National Air and Space Museum.

Featuring x-rays of each piece of a spacesuit, the Suited for Space exhibit revealed a surprising attribute of NASA’s 40-year-old technology: it wasn’t much different than that of today. The images looked almost exactly like the suits used for modern space exploration. One could argue that the shelving of once-vital programs by a sluggish modern-day NASA has hindered the advancement of space technology. But the more likely scenario is that the suit’s designers got it right the first time.

“The inner workings and components show how they’ve come up with design solutions for very real problems, like keeping the air inside and keeping the spacesuit from blowing up,” says Cathy Lewis, curator of international space programs and spacesuits at the National Air and Space Museum. This iconic ensemble, so ingrained in the American psyche, has come a long way – in years that is.

The post Hauntingly Beautiful Spacesuit X-Rays are Science + Art first appeared on Gajitz.

There is a very good reason that geeks gravitate toward technology-based jobs: we like to play with stuff. Awesome Redditor Diabolikal49 works with industrial X-ray systems and, in the interest of entertaining the rest of us, X-rayed some video game controllers.

What happened then was nothing short of magical. The mundane plastic contraptions suddenly look like impressively complex feats of engineering.

Every interior component is suddenly made clear in stylish greyscale. Some of the most impressive pieces are the screws which hold the devices together. They appear to float in mid-air when the thin plastic shrouds of the case are removed.

The screws and cords are equally lovely. Some of the controllers manage to look like complex musical instruments, while others look like a jumble of electronic parts.

The post Peek Inside: Industrial X-Rays of Video Game Controllers first appeared on Gajitz.

If there is one inconvertible truth about scientists, it is that they are inherently curious. Even though they have known for ages that lightning emits radiation, the scientific community wasn’t happy with that knowledge until they could see it for themselves. That’s why graduate student Meagan Schaal, a graduate student working at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne under lightning researcher Joseph Dwyer, developed a camera fast enough to catch X-rays coming off of a lightning strike. The lightning was artificially triggered in December 2010 by launching little rockets with wires attached to them into thunderstorms. The wires helped steer the lightning in the camera’s field of view.

The camera itself is a feat of engineering: it’s a 1,500-pound beast that captures ten million images per second just to get a good shot of the ultra-fast lightning strikes. The camera is roughly the size and shape of a refrigerator and houses an X-ray detector. The box is lead-lined to protect the X-ray detector from stray radiation. As strange as the camera is, it worked like a charm: the first X-ray pictures of lightning are incredible. They show a large concentration of X-rays at the head of the bolt and the radiation tapers off to almost non-existent at the tail.

The post Massive Camera Catches First X-Ray Pictures of Lightning first appeared on Gajitz.