New Ultrafast Camera Invented At Washington University Could Help Turn Science Fiction Into Reality

What if we could design a camera that could take a hundred billion pictures in a second ― enough to record the fastest phenomena in the universe.

Sounds like science fiction, right?

But it’s not: a new ultrafast imaging system developed at Washington University can do just that.

Biomedical engineer Lihong Wang and his research lab have already invented or discovered a whole bunch of high tech imaging techniques, like functional photoacoustic tomography, dark-field confocal photoacoustic microscopy, time-reversed ultrasonically encoded optical focusing ― and a lot of other things I had never heard of.

So it probably won’t come as a surprise that the new camera Wang’s team has developed isn’t exactly your ordinary point-and-shoot. "For the first time, humans can literally see light pulses traveling in space at the speed of light,” Wang said.

Read more at stlpublicradio.org.