A camera that can image one trillion frames per second.

This camera is so fast it can photograph the movement of a beam of light!  I'm linking to the Balloon Juice post about it because Levenson's commentary is good.

What struck me about this project from MIT is that no one involved seems to have a typical American name.  The two project leaders on the video have obvious accents.  This is of little interest or consequence, but 50 years ago that wouldn't have been the case. 

50 years ago most leading edge technology was (white) American-led, with maybe some Europeans involved.  Having grown up in the era, most Americans assumed whites were the most intelligent people in the world and were destined to always be the ones leading the way on all major new discoveries.  Now we realize with delight that the rest of the world is pretty damn smart too.  However, I suspect many older whites may find this threatening, especially those who believe their white skin alone makes them superior to the vast majority of the world that has darker skin.

--Trakker

Comments

[horsec]

Those clever English-speaking foreigners

Supermarket scanners uses mirrors to sweep the laser across the barcode, as an engineer who built laser interferometers told me. Mirrors, because we don't have magnets big enough to bend light.

Reading the barcode in any orientation is done in software, another good trick.

[Trakker]

You know of course that someday every baby will be tattooed with a bar code so lasers from satellites can track everyone. Not sure if they will use mirrors or not. (I meant this to be tongue-in-cheek, but once I wrote it, it seemed, gulp, prescient)