This fascinating TED talk was given last month by MIT researcher Ramesh Raskar on his femto-photography camera that snaps images at a whopping one trillion frames per second — a rate so fast that it can capture light in motion. The technology may one day be used to build cameras that shoot around corners or see into the human body without X-rays.

The “femtosecond transient imaging system” is a camera being developed by researchers at MIT that uses high intensity light from a femtosecond laser to capture images from around corners. Once the laser beam bounces around the scene and returns to the sensor, algorithms are used to turn the time and distance information into a representation of the scene.
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