This camera snaps photos three billion times faster than an iPhone

Washington University in Saint Louis researchers demonstrated their upgraded camera by pointing laser light onto a printout of a toy car to create a movie of the light reaching different portions of the car at different times. A new approach to high-speed photography could help capture the clearest-ever footage of light pulses, explosions or neurons firing in the brain, according to a team of ultrafast camera developers. The technique involves shooting 100 billion frames per second in a single exposure without an external light source. That means, for example, there would be no need to set off multiple explosions just to gather enough data to create a video reconstructing exactly how chemicals react to create the blast. A team of Washington University in Saint Louis researchers introduced their "single-shot compressed ultrafast photography" camera two years ago.