Neutrinos, the so-called ghost particles, are notoriously difficult to detect. Billions of them generated by the Sun pass through your body every second -- and at night, that's after passing through the entire Earth -- and you never notice, because they hardly every interact with anything. Their antimatter cousin, the antineutrino, is similarly ghostly but just a little easier to detect ... as long as you have a detector the size of an office building buried a mile underground to shield it from cosmic rays (which would drown out the antineutrino signal with false positives).
That's what a team of geophysicists led by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency did: in fact, they built two dectors and combined with data from 400 nuclear power plants around the world to make a map of natural and man-made radioactivity (which generates antineutrinos). The map below shows intensity of natural sources (particularly in central China) combined with pinpoints of manmade genreration at nuclear sites. The nuclear power network in Europe is particularly clear.
That's all for this week. See you on Monday!
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