[curiousgal]

Well imagine if the pellet fell on the road, another car drove by and the pellet got stuck in one of the car's tire grooves. The car eventually makes it to a parking lot, or to the back of someone's ranch. Good luck finding it, short of monitoring hospitals for radiation poisoning patients.

[maven29]

Perhaps a nation-wide campaign to cover your phone camera lens with tape and then look for artifacts from gamma rays hitting the CMOS sensor?

[hilbert42]

Well, that's one way. Monitoring/surveillance cameras in hot spots in nuclear facilities are often known to have horrible fuzzy images (sometimes it's difficult to see what's being monitored).

It's an interesting question how close one would have to get for the CMOS sensor to register notably in this instance. Given the stated radiation signature of this sample it's likely one would have to get pretty close, so it may not be a useful technique.

I can't recall having read anything about smartphone CMOS sensors and radiation thresholds so I'd be interested in hearing from anyone whose knowledgeable about the matter.

[dsfyu404ed]

You might as well make up a story about a kangaroo eating it and then someone hunting and eating the 'roo.

The odds for any one small object to get not only picked up but picked up and not tossed back out are astronomically tiny.