Featured Image Credit: WLADIMIR BULGAR/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Paul Taylor / Getty
Do you remember the days when phones were just starting to offer slow-motion video in their cameras?
You'd feel like you were on the cutting edge if you could get a very slight bit of slow-mo going, whereas that's now something that almost every flagship phone can offer in spades.
These pocketable slow-motion cameras, though, are absolutely nothing compared to the world's fastest camera, which can capture video at a truly jaw-dropping 156.3 trillion frames per second.
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The tech is truly new, and has a pretty wild name, too: 'Swept-coded aperture real-time femtophotography'. That mouthful is thankfully abbreviated to SCARF, though.
Although that frame rate is almost unbelievable, it's worth clarifying that the camera system is designed to shoot still images rather than video, so you won't get dramatic footage from it.
Rather, it's able to capture unbelievably sharp photography free of blur - even when things are happening incredibly quickly.
And it's going to be used as research technology. SCARF can, for instance, capture the process by which the demagnetization of a metal alloy happens, something that's normally so quick it seems instantaneous.
The research around SCARF has been published in the science journal Nature Communications, and is causing waves as scientists consider the possibilities the new tech could bring.
Miguel Marquez, postdoctoral fellow from the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), University of Quebec and co-first author of the study, said: “Many systems based on compressed ultrafast photography have to cope with degraded data quality and have to trade the sequence depth of the field of view."
SCARF should help to make these limitations a thing of the past for those who are able to use it, making it possible to properly observe some incredibly rare phenomena.
This could apparently be particularly helpful in medical and pharmaceutical fields, where being able to observe the changes in cells as different conditions change could help drastically speed up research.
Photos of the setup that SCARF uses are super interesting, too, showing that it's basically a chain of devices, including lenses and mirrors, that bounce light around, captured through a series of sensors.
This isn't a simple box-style camera, then, but rather a sort of miniature chain of tools that comes together to allow the incredibly precise shots. SCARF quickly pulses a tiny laser to help it capture the light spectrum in its totality, getting that all-important shot - it's complicated stuff!
