Nuclear engineering students at Berkeley have built a tabletop neutron source that's relatively cheap, portable, and able to produce a narrow but useful range of neutron energies without undesirable radioactive byproducts. "Any hospital in the country could have this thing, they could build it for a few hundred thousand dollars to make local, very short-lived medical isotopes -- you could just run them up the elevator to the patient," says nuclear engineering professor Karl van Bibber, the faculty member overseeing the project. "It has application in geochronology, neutron activation analysis for law enforcement agencies -- when the FBI wants to determine the provenance of a sample as evidence, for example -- neutron radiography, to look for cracks in aircraft parts. This is very compact, the size of a little convection oven; I think it's great, we are excited about this." This story originated at Berkeley News.