[00:00.00]Imagine a camera that can take one hundred billion pictures a second -- that is enough to record the fastest movements in the universe.
[00:11.96]But we do not have to imagine it, because a scientist has invented such a camera. 
[00:19.28]He calls it an imaging system. It may seem like science fiction, but it is science reality.
[00:28.14]Lihong Wang is a biomedical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. 
[00:36.22]He leads a team of researchers who have discovered several new imaging techniques.
[00:43.05]"For the first time, humans can literally see light pulses traveling in space at the speed of light."
[00:50.42]The speed of light is almost 300 million meters per second. 
[00:56.13]At that speed, it would take just one second to travel around the world seven-and-a-half times. 
[01:05.00]Mr. Wang photographs light particles moving at that speed using a unique camera.
[01:12.12]"The streak camera is a very specialized device that allows us to convert time into space. 
[01:19.15]We convert light particles, or photons, into electrons, then pull the electrons, really hard, at different rates, depending on the time of arrival. 
[01:28.10]So the time of arrival will be converted into different vertical positions."
[01:33.56]Mr. Wang's new technology improves on other ultra-fast cameras in important ways. 
[01:41.58]Until now, streak cameras could only take a one-dimensional photograph. 
[01:47.90]That is like looking through a vertical opening and trying to take a picture of something flying by really fast.
[01:56.57]The fastest cameras had to have an external, or outside, light source to work. 
[02:03.58]But Mr. Wang's technique does not need special lighting. 
[02:08.50]It produces two-dimensional images like regular photographs, but at a speed of one image every 10 trillionths of a second.
[02:18.70]Brian Pogue is a biomedical engineer at Dartmouth College in the eastern American state of New Hampshire. 
[02:27.19]He reviewed the new imaging system for the science publication Nature. 
[02:33.02]He says this new way of seeing the movement of light could lead to major scientific discoveries in areas like optical cloaking.
[02:44.29]"Cloaking" is a kind of technology that can make an object -- like a spaceship -- seem to disappear. 
[02:52.27]Mr. Pogue says the military would like to use cloaking.
[02:57.14]"There's a lot of interest in getting light to bend around objects, so it sort of looks like you're seeing through them."
[03:04.03]Brian Pogue says Mr. Wang's new system lets researchers photograph light as it bends. 
[03:12.48]He says they have not been able to do that until now. 
[03:16.83]He says this development could help make optical cloaking a reality.
[03:22.88]Lihong Wang imagines other uses for the new camera in such scientific fields as molecular biology and astronomy. 
[03:33.17]He says ultrafast imaging could lead to new discoveries.
[03:39.33]I'm Jonathan Evans.