Science:
The safety of the full-body x-ray scanners used at airports is
being questioned by several scientists. Five professors at the
University of California, San Francisco, and one at Arizona
State University have written a
letter
to White House science adviser John Holdren in which they
question why the Transportation Security Administration
won’t allow independent testing of the scanners by
outside scientists. Although the TSA says the scanners have
already been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration,
NIST, and the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics
Laboratory, the letter writers point out flaws in the testing.
In addition, studies published in scientific journals in the
last few months have also “cast doubt on the radiation
dose and the machines' ability to find explosives,”
according
to Michael Grabell of ProPublica.
