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As seen in the June issue of Popular Science. We love this photo

Rush-hour traffic outside Boston got messier than usual on March 9, when a UPS truck hauling 16,000 pounds of industrial printer ink flipped and shut down an interstate access ramp. When the red, yellow and blue ink hit the pavement, it spread like Technicolor through Oz.

Cleanup crews working with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection arrived on the scene within hours to contain the spill and prevent the ink, which is nontoxic, from reaching the water table. First they tried to soak it up with sand. When that didn’t work, they simply repaved the spill site. The ordeal shut down a 500-foot stretch of Route 128 for most of the day—but at least commuters got a smoother road out of it.

Ravnitzky is a chief counsel at the Postal Regulatory Commission, the government agency that oversees the U.S. Postal Service. The post office is in bad shape. From 2006 to 2009, mail volume dropped by 17 percent; the USPS lost $8.5 billion dollars last year, and officials have threatened to cut Saturday service. But where others see an inefficient and increasingly outdated system, Ravnitzky sees opportunity.

With its 218,684 vehicles stopping at more than 150 million delivery points along some 232,000 routes every day, the postal-delivery fleet could be reconceived as a vast data-gathering network. “If you were designing a data collection system from scratch, it would look a lot like the postal service,” Ravnitzky says. As he reasoned in a New York Times op-ed last December, the postal network could be used to measure air pollution and ozone levels while aiding Homeland Security operations by scanning for biological or chemical agents. Or it might detect and report WiFi and cellular dead zones. Using telematics, the postal service could evolve into an entirely new kind of public utility. It could also provide a new source of revenue. Private companies or other government agencies could buy space for their sensors on mail trucks.

Although Ravnitzky’s idea is just that—an idea—there’s precedent: Two years ago, 32 Greyhound buses rigged with sensors set off across the country to gather atmospheric and environmental data for the National Weather Service; 2,000 more such buses will roll out soon.

There’s already real interest in Ravnitzky’s plan. Marc Chapman, a compliance director for Atmos Energy, the largest natural-gas distributor in the country, says he is looking into whether sensors could be attached to postal-service trucks to detect gas leaks. Telematics might just save Saturday delivery.

Only a few percent of the 15 million or so cargo containers that enter the country every year are screened for nukes, a number that Congress mandates must be 100 percent by 2012. That benchmark is impractical using today’s tech, however. Standard detectors can miss nuclear material hidden behind lead or steel, and naturally radioactive cargo such as kitty litter gives false positives, requiring a labor-intensive hand-search.

A new detector from Decision Sciences, a security company in California, sees through anything and can scan a semi in less than a minute. It tracks muons, cosmic particles constantly bombarding Earth. Muons penetrate everything but are deflected more by heavy atoms such as uranium and plutonium. The detector tracks these deflections.

The company finished lab tests this spring and is now building detectors to deploy at several ports in the next year. “As long as it works quickly enough, it should fit the bill,” says Robert Dynes, a physicist at the University of California at San Diego who reviewed radiation detectors for Homeland Security. Tests indicate that the device should be speedy on real cargo, says Decision Sciences’s chief technology officer, Allan Wegner. And it’s nearly foolproof. Wegner can’t go into detail about its weaknesses (for obvious reasons), but he assures us that kitty litter and watermelons will no longer threaten national security.

How It Works

As muons come from the sky, they pass through the top detector, the truck and the bottom detector. The muons create ionization trails in the scanner's gas-filled detector tubes, which sensors record.

Heavy atoms, such as uranium and plutonium, deflect muons more than lighter ones do. If the angles of muons' entrance and exit paths vary by a wide magin, nuclear material could be present.

The detector also senses gamma radiation, which the computer combines with muon data to build a 3D view of suspicious muon-scattering objects, alerting customs agents exactly where to search.