Delays and denials of shipments involving regulated radioactive materials used in medicine and industry are of growing concern to safety and industry experts. Meeting in Rome this week at an IAEA workshop, they agreed on an action plan for the Mediterranean region that seeks to ease hardships for hospitals, research centres and organizations that rely on timely delivery of beneficial radiation sources.

Far from the everyday world occupied by such common elements such as gold and lead lies a little-understood realm inhabited by radioactive, or unstable, elements. Recently, a nuclear physicist from Florida State University collaborated with other scientists from the United States, Japan and England in an experiment that illustrated how the “normal” rules of physics don’t apply for some of these radioactive elements.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, with funding from DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration*, have devised ways to improve the performance of radiation detectors, such as those used by law enforcement agencies to locate and identify radioactive material.