Muon Tomography

GPS doesn’t work as well inside buildings, underground or underwater. Now engineers in Japan have developed and tested an alternative technology that uses cosmic rays to track movement beneath a building with precision of a few meters.

​Cosmic rays are raining down over Earth every day, but you’d never know unless you had the right tools. Those tools mostly take the form of bulky, expensive lab equipment, but thanks to an MIT team, you can now build your own detector for US$100 – small enough to take on a plane or the subway.​

An international research team has been given the novel task of developing a practical means of monitoring underground stores of CO2 using none other than cosmic rays.