It’s their potential for imaging that is on the rise these days. Neutrons have a history of use in cancer treatment but have lost ground to proton beams since the 1990s. That allows them to pass much more easily through matter. Neutrons are similar in mass to protons but lack electric charge. “Fossilized stomach contents are extremely rare, especially crocodiles, who have the most potent stomach acids in the animal kingdom.” Without neutron tomography, as this kind of mapping is known, nothing short of breaking the fossil apart would have revealed the unfortunate dino. “I was blown away and didn’t believe it at first,” says Matt White, a paleontologist at the University of New England in Australia, who co-authored a paper in Gondwana Research describing the discovery. The Cretaceous croc that had been snacking on a dinosaur exemplifies the other growing uses of fundamental particles. And she believes proton therapy will soon get even more effective, thanks to briefer, more intense proton beam treatments known as FLASH therapy, which are in the works. But Lee suspects that protons are good enough and will prevail as the more developed option for the foreseeable future. Researchers are investigating radiation therapy that relies on electrically charged carbon atoms, which contain six protons and six neutrons, making them much more massive than individual protons. Theoretically, particles that are heavier still would be even more precise. The proton’s heft and electric charge are what allows the precise penetration. It’s a bit like sending a cancer-killing missile into a tumor: some damage will result from the missile’s path through the body, but the burst at the end is much more destructive. By adjusting the energy of the protons coming out of an accelerator, a doctor can choose the penetration depth that will deliver them directly to a target. Instead a proton releases its energy in one quick burst after traveling a distance that depends on the proton’s initial energy. But it doesn’t distribute energy along its path the way photons do. When an accelerated proton enters your body, it loses some energy because of collisions with the atoms in your cells.
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Proton beams, on the other hand, do comparatively little damage to tissue in front of a tumor and none to tissue behind it, thanks to the way protons lose energy as they pass through material, including the human body. These two varieties of photons, or particles of light, damage healthy tissue both in front of and behind the tumor that’s the intended target.
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Treatment facilities have also multiplied, from a dozen or so at the beginning of the century to more than 100 today.ĭoctors can tune beams of protons to precisely destroy specific targets, usually cancerous tumors, without harming nearby organs-unlike x-rays and gamma rays, which have historically been the go-to beams for cancer therapy. In the two decades since, the number has exploded to about 200,000 patients worldwide. But by the early 2000s, fewer than 10,000 people had benefited from it. Proton therapy for cancer was pioneered in the 1950s. “Right now the waiting lists are well over a month,” she says. The logistic challenge of providing the therapy to people at a reasonable cost is the primary reason patients still turn to other options.
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When pulled out of atoms and sped up in particle accelerators, they become precise cancer-fighting tools that are safer and more effective than more common x-ray and gamma-ray treatments, according to Nancy Lee of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Along with neutrons and electrons, they’re components of the atoms that make up us and everything around us.
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Researchers are increasingly turning to protons, neutrons, muons and neutrinos as tools for precisely targeting tricky tumors, probing fossils and volcanoes and revealing the hidden structures of Earth, among an ever expanding list of applications. These tiny bits of matter have long been interesting to physicists seeking to understand the underlying laws of nature, but they are proving to have much more practical uses as well. The archeological surprise is just one of many feats that would be difficult or impossible without subatomic particles. The scientists had set out to see if neutrons-the building blocks of atomic nuclei, along with protons-could offer better images of fossils than x-rays and made the startling discovery that a croc in the Cretaceous period had eaten a previously unknown species of juvenile ornithopod dinosaur before it died. An ancient crocodile’s last meal might never have come to light were it not for researchers deciding to scan the rock-embedded fossil with a beam of neutrons.