There's an old adage that one person's trash is another person's treasure. Take the case of a Canadian physics lab that realized the radioactive waste it had been stockpiling was actually a rare, expensive, potentially cancer-destroying medical isotope. "It was literally putting two and two together," said Paul Schaffer, an associate lab director at TRIUMF, a particle physics research facility in Vancouver. Though TRIUMF largely focuses on using its particle accelerator to research nuclear physics, it also has a life sciences division, where Schaffer works. This allowed him to make the connection that the work the lab's physicists were doing had a valuable byproduct: a rare medical isotope, called actinium.

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