Dr. Robert (Bob) Novella

speaker

1,941 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 19 Sep

Dr. Robert (Bob) Novella’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.

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The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe · The Skeptics Guide #875 - Apr 16 2022 podcast

You'd filter them out, and then you'd filter those out, and you would have just your tiny little frequency, like a monochromatic x-ray image,

And that would be fine, but it would be very inefficient and it would be dim because you're taking away most of the frequencies.

You're just focusing on just that one frequency that happened to focus because it's monochromatic.

And it would be very expensive.

Now, it would be bright because you went to this big synchrotron.

But it would be expensive.

You would have to plan it.

You would have to call them and say, all right, I want to take this image.

When can you fit me in?

Three months?

Like, you know, you can't do quick, nimble research with a device when you're counting on something like that.

You need something smaller, cheaper that you could just have in your lab, in your company.

They didn't exist until these guys started really trying to develop an achromatic X-ray lens.

So what they did was they figured out, let's see, they said the trick was to realize that we could position a second refractive lens in front of our diffractive lens.

So what they did was they had to look at not similar materials, but different optical principles and put them together.

So refractive, diffractive.

And the other critical component that only recently became available was they did, using 3D printing with a special polymer, they were able to create, they were able to build the specific lens component that they needed to refract the x-rays.

Yeah, right.

They had the mental breakthrough that you could put the refractive in front of the diffractive, and then they needed to build that refractive piece, or they needed to build the component using 3D printing.

Bob, they 3D printed something?

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