The accelerator community has a lot of examples of applications of accelerators used for the benefit of the society. One of the most unexpected applications is the pioneering use of compact modular linear accelerators for treating the exhaust gas of diesel engines of ships.

The Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is explained as a medical imaging technique widely used in hospitals to detect anomalies in the body of patients (like cancer tumors) on a daily basis. The article explains how PET works and how knowledge of basic physics processes is used to visualize the physiological processes in biological systems.

One unexpected real-life application of Einstein’s theory of relativity, used by almost everybody every day, is the GPS navigation system.

Some details of how this works are given in this short story.

A first-hand witness of the experience of the main author searching for hidden cavities inside the Sun pyramid in Mexico, in a collaboration of Mexican physics groups and archeologists. This is explained as an example of the many applications of muon tomography.

Among the IPPOG Forum members, many experimentalists work with (or even developed) specialized muon detectors for the purposes of fundamental research. However, such devises find many direct applications for society spanning from scanning lories and controlling the nuclear fuel that was spent in power plants to exploring underground cavities.