Modern Science Needs Ancient Roman Lead—And That’s a Problem

A 2,000-year-old Roman shipwreck off the coast of Sardinia, carrying over 30 metric tons of lead ingots, has provided invaluable material for 21st-century scientific experiments. The ancient lead, having stabilized over millennia, is now used to shield sensitive particle physics experiments. One is the search for neutrinoless double beta decay, a process that could help explain the dominance of matter in the universe.