S. Shwartz

Radioactive tracers are like a courier with a beacon: you inject it into the body, and it highlights the target organ on the scan. But this courier comes with strict rules: you can't send it often, it quickly 'gets tired,' and it costs a lot. Doctors have long dreamed of a way to see an organ without radiation.

Conventional X-ray fluorescence analysis works like a meticulous scribe: to learn the composition of a picture, it walks over every square centimeter and logs whether lead or copper is present. For a flat sheet, that's tolerable, but for a three-dimensional object, it's torture.