Los Alamos National Laboratory (www.lanl.gov) scientists have developed a detector that can see through lead or other heavy shielding to reveal uranium, plutonium or other dense materials that may be smuggled across U.S. borders. With a technique called muon radiography, scientists measure the natural scattering of muons, which are produced by the decay of cosmic rays showering down on Earth.

Using an average energy of 3 billion electron volts, muons can penetrate approximately six feet of lead and hit the nuclear material underneath. Nuclear materials, which have large numbers of protons and ...

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