While visiting my Memaw last week in South Texas, I got a chance to peruse her UC Berkeley Wellness Letter. On the front page they have a list of Wellness Facts, including a very informative little paragraph about the full body scanners, aka nudie-scopes, that are popping up all over the country.

According the American College of Radiology, the radiation from the nudie-scopes is negligible. Flying for a few minutes at 30,000 miles exposes you to the same amount of radiation, and you would have to do a thousand scans to get the same radiation dose as a chest X-ray. (Of course before this I hadn’t realized that flying exposed you to radiation at all. But I guess that’s a post for another day.)

So. We can still hate them, think they are too expensive, and too time consuming for what they do, but at least we don’t have to worry about radiation poisoning for frequent fliers. Thanks Berkeley!