In just about every industrial factory you'll see them: huge lead pipes. These move fluid—often super hot, or even steamed water. Over time, the fluids wear the pipes down. Or maybe they get dinged by a passing forklift. Or maybe changes in temperature cause tiny cracks to appear. Then the pipe bursts, and people get hurt.

Inspecting pipes is a pain in the tochus. Usually these pipes are covered in insulation and pumping hot, high pressure steam. To inspect them, you have to shut down the pipe, take it out of service, remove the insulation, then apply X-rays or ultrasound—both of which require special certification to use because of the radiation involved.

But the days of butt-achey industrial inspection could be numbered, because a group of scientists at Los Alamos National Lab (you know, the atomic bomb place?) have figured out how to see through just about anything—including the radioactive disaster zone inside the Fukushima reactor core—using subatomic particles from outer space.

"Any industrial process is subject to flow-accelerated corrosion," says Matt Durham, lead author of a new paper detailing the process, called muon tomography. Inside a pipe, whichever side that's in contact with a fluid tends to get eaten up. The difficulty of disassembling a pipe for inspection means that comprehensive checks rarely happen. But using muons, "you don't have to tear it apart," says Durham. "You just have to zap it from the outside."

Except Durham's method doesn't really do any zapping. The muon detector doesn't emit anything. Instead, it just logs naturally-occurring muons as they enter and exit the pipe in question. Radioactive particles like these are everywhere in the universe. These ones start as particles called pions, which fly around in outer space until they enter the Earth's atmosphere and decay into muons.

The detector works like this: Durham and his co-investigators sandwich the pipe in question between two four-by-four-foot aluminum slabs. When an errant muon passes through one of the slabs, it sends a message to a computer, which logs the particle's trajectory. The muon continues through the pipe, then passes through the slab on the other side—which again measures the particle's angle. By calculating the difference between angles, researchers can get an idea of the path the muon took through the pipe's molecules. And with enough muons, they can draw a pretty good picture of what's going on inside the pipe.