Getting an X-ray can be uncomfortable – you may have to lay still while you’re in pain or have part of your body compressed. But a flexible fabric that makes X-rays easier to detect could eliminate that.

“Imagine scanning a child’s injury without immobilising them, or enabling pain-free breast exams,” says at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She and her colleagues created a textile called X-Wear that scintillates – meaning it releases light when exposed to X-rays – which could make this a reality.

Because X-rays are more difficult to detect than visible light, medical and industrial X-rays, as well as CT scans, use scintillating components. These can pick up X-rays after, for example, passing through a limb, converting the rays that emerge into visible light that can then be used to create an image of the body part to show internal detail like broken bones. But the most commonly used scintillators are rigid, which makes the devices they are embedded in bulky and uncomfortable to interact with.

To avoid this, the researchers re-shaped scintillating materials, for instance gadolinium oxide studded with bits of europium, into narrow fibres, which they then wove into fabric.

Xu says that it was a technical challenge to make these fibres flexible while also ensuring they emit enough light to create high-resolution images once they are hit with X-rays. Her team demonstrated that the fabric can be useful for taking dental X-rays – in tests, it made X-Wear conform to the shape of a mouth model made from clay and teeth. It also used it for mammography, where it created an X-Wear bra that eliminated the need for a person’s breast to be compressed during imaging, which is standard current practice.

at the University of Surrey in the UK says that X-Wear’s ability to conform to the body is a big advantage compared with other flexible scintillator designs that are typically film-like and bendy, but can’t wrap around objects. However, he says that detectors for light that X-Wear must be paired with are still flat, which currently limits possible uses of the fabric.

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The researchers can produce samples of X-Wear up to around a quarter of a square metre, so before it can be widely used, they will have to scale its production to larger sizes and adapt it to industrial-grade equipment, says Xu.

The team is also working on industrial applications for X-Wear, such as small, flexible devices for inspecting electronics or pipelines for flaws. Xu says that first responders in a disaster zone could also use X-Wear alongside a smartphone and a compact X-ray source to do on-site scans.

The world’s brightest X-ray machine has just produced its first record-breaking X-rays, which will allow researchers to observe atoms, molecules and chemical reactions in unmatched detail.

The machine – the Linac Coherent Light Source II (LCLS-II) X-ray laser at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California – recently completed an upgrade process that began more than a decade ago. The X-rays it generates now are, on average, 10,000 times brighter than those made by the original LCLS facility.

LCLS-II produces X-rays through a complex process involving lasers, electrons, microwaves and magnets. First, researchers use an ultraviolet laser to knock electrons out of a copper plate before accelerating them with a device that emits intense microwave pulses. The electrons then move through a maze composed of thousands of magnets. This makes them wiggle back and forth and emit X-rays in predictable, well-controlled bursts. Researchers direct these pulses onto objects and materials to image their internal structure. The X-rays are a trillion trillion times brighter than those used in medical procedures.

The X-rays that LCLS-II produces have gotten so much brighter in part because the SLAC team refurbished the 3-kilometre-long metal tube that the electrons travel through with a lining made of niobium. This metal can withstand exposure to unprecedentedly energetic electrons when cooled to about -271°C. To keep the tube suitably cool, the team had to install a giant cryogenic plant below ground.

There were other engineering challenges: The maze magnets had to be calibrated extremely precisely to make sure the X-rays pulses have the correct shape, says at SLAC. “Every single part of this system had to work just right simultaneously.”

He and his colleagues began sending electrons through the niobium tunnel in September 2022. Over the past 12 months, they have been calibrating every piece of the machine and incrementally ramping up its power.

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“It’s been an incredible ride watching the invention and establishment of this new destructive yet powerful technique for watching nature in action,” says at La Trobe University in Australia. “There were so many sceptics at the beginning saying this noisy, unstable beast of a machine – the first LCLS – will never yield new science. Now, over a decade later, using these X-rays is well-established and has enabled us to watch in unprecedented detail how biochemical processes occur on the atomic scale.”

Zatsepin says that LCLS-II will enable researchers to make “molecular movies” of processes in biology such as mammalian vision, photosynthesis, drug binding and gene regulation.

Dunne says that the machine’s ability to produce not only bright X-rays but also many X-rays in an extremely short time will allow researchers to see what happens inside technologically important materials, such as those used for artificial photosynthetic devices or the next generation of semiconductors. And more exotic materials that are not fully understood at the quantum level – superconductors or so-called topological phases – could be demystified by examining them with LCLS-II’s X-rays, he says.

“This is a very broad scientific tool, like a powerful microscope that can look at everything from quantum materials to biological systems to catalytic chemistry to atomic physics, and it will look at all of those, and many, many more,” says Dunne.

Digital scans of an Egyptian mummy have revealed a teenage boy buried with a “second heart” made from gold, as well as dozens of other amulets that the ancient Egyptians believed were important for the afterlife.

The mummy, which had been left undisturbed in the basement of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo since 1916, is from around 300 BC in the Ptolemaic period.

at Cairo University digitally unwrapped the small, gold-covered mummy with computed tomography (CT), which involved using hundreds of high-resolution X-ray images to display the skeleton and soft tissue, and reveal 49 amulets of 21 different types.

As well as finding a 3-centimetre golden scarab in the mummy’s chest cavity, symbolising a heart, Saleem and her team discovered a golden tongue inside the skull’s mouth area, an amulet in the shape of two fingers next to the embalming incision mark on the left thigh, and other religious amulets made from gold, semi-precious stones and brightly coloured ceramics.

The boy’s own heart remained in the chest, as a spiritual symbol, say the researchers, as .

The amulets had supposed protective properties for the arduous journey to the afterlife that the Egyptians believed came after death. “The family of the boy offered him a very expensive level of embalming treatment to be prepared properly and equipped for the underground journey to reach the afterlife safely,” says Saleem, such as sandals to walk out of the coffin and a golden tongue to speak with.

The researchers used the CT scans to 3D print a reconstruction of the golden heart. “The large, golden heart scarab amulet is really amazing, especially after I printed it and was able to hold it in my hands,” says Saleem. “There were engraved marks on the back of the 3D-printed amulet that could represent inscriptions and spells.”

These inscriptions appeared to include verses from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which states that the heart scarab is needed to silence the heart when judged by the gods en route to the afterlife.

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