Wouldn’t you love to have a camera with a .0000000005 second shutter speed? You could shoot anything in the lowest light imaginable. That’s exactly the speed of the STEAM camera, a new super camera in use by scientists reporting in the journal Nature.
How does it work? You guessed it, LASERS!!! (Seriously, what can’t lasers do.) The Serial Time-Encoded Amplified iMaging (you see the STEAM, yes?) essentially detects the reflections of lazorz micropulses that are less than a millionth of a millionth of a second long. By reading the 2-D rainbow these reflections project, a detection device can then create an image. The best part of the camera, though, is that the ‘shutter’ can fire continuously, allowing researchers to capture events that are apparently random, or at least so freakishly rare you couldn’t plan for them. One possible application? Watching neurons fire. Awesome.
Source: BBC
