New technology allows archaeologists to use particle physics to explore the past

  Naples, Italy — Beneath the honking cornucopias and melodramatic yelling of Naples, the most blissfully chaotic megacity in Italy, archeologist Raffaella Bosso descends into the blaring silence of an underground maze, slaloming back in time roughly 2,300 times.

Before the Ancient Romans, it was the Ancient Greeks who settled Naples, leaving behind traces of life, and death, inside ancient burial chambers, she says.

She points a flashlight at a gravestone- relief headstone that depicts the legs and bases of those buried outside.

"She tells me that "there are two people, a man and a woman" in this one grave."typically you can find eight or indeed more."

This grave was discovered in 1981, the old- fashioned way, by digging.

Now, archeologists are joining forces with physicists, trading their pickaxes for subatomic flyspeck sensors about the size of a ménage microwave oven.

Thanks to breakthrough technology, flyspeck physicists like Valeri Tioukov can use them to see through hundreds of bases of gemstone, no matter the apartment structure located 60 bases above us.

" It's veritably analogous to radiography," he says, as he places his flyspeck sensor beside the damp wall, still adorned by various flowery oils.

Archeologists long suspected there were fresh chambers on the other side of the wall. But just to peep, they would have had to break them down.

Thanks to this sensor, they now know for sure, and they did not indeed have to use a shovel.

Tioukov takes us to his laboratory at the University of Naples, where researchers go through the sensor's photographs to understand the technology in action.

Specifically, they are looking for muons, cosmic shafts left over from the Big Bang.

The muon sensor tracks and counts the muons passing through the structure, also determines the viscosity of the structure's internal space by tracking the number of muons that pass through it.

Over the course of 28 days, it collected roughly 10 million muons at the burial chamber.

"That's a muon right there," Tioukov remarks, gesturing to a wavy line that he is using a microscope to blow up.

After months of meticulous analysis, Tioukov and his platoon are suitable to put together a three- dimensional model of that retired burial chamber, closed to mortal eyes for centuries, now opened thanks to flyspeck drugs.

What seems like wisdom fabrication is also being used to blink inside the conglomerations in Egypt, chambers beneath tinderboxes, and indeed treat cancer, says Professor Giovanni De Lellis.

"Especially malignancies that are located far within the body," he claims. This technology is being used to gauge potential harm to healthy tissue surrounding cancerous areas. It's veritably hard to prognosticate the advance that this technology could actually bring into any of these fields because we've noway observed objects with this delicacy."