“Megaframe” camera is so small it can go inside neural pathways (oh, and it shoots at 1,000,000FPS)

Your average “compact” camera today can record 30 frames per second at 640×480. What would you say, then, to a camera so compact it could sit inside one of your cells, so sensitive it can detect a single photon, and record at a million frames per second? Well first, you might say “keep that camera out of my cells, by god!” —But after that, the applications start occurring to you. Want to watch proteins unravel in slow motion? Go for it. Want to watch ATP shed an atom? Sounds good! Just don’t expect to get it in HD: the Megaframe photon detector array, at 128×128 photon wells, is only 16 kilopixels.
Megaframe is an EU-funded project aimed at miniaturizing a CMOS sensor to the smallest possible level. One can only acknowledge they have done to a ridiculous extent. Each well in that picture at the top can detect a single photon, and is capable of doing so up to a million times per second. Now that even puts the D3s’ 102,400 ISO to shame. Its 50-picosecond margin of error may not be short enough for some stuff, but hey, it’s better than anything I’ve got.
This kind of imaging isn’t actually new, and research has been going on for a few years, but they’ve only relatively recently ended its research phase and is now in execution, if I read correctly. That means that there are labs around the world giving this sucker a spin.
Seriously, this technology has the potential to really change the way molecular biology is done, among other things. If it’s interesting to you, visit the project’s page, or the ICT Results summary.
[CrunchGear via Science Daily; image credit: H.R. Petty]

John Carmack's Armadillo Finally Wins Lunar Landing Challenge [Space]

After crashing the last time, Armadillo Aerospace won the $1,000,000 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge this Saturday. Needless to say, Doom-creator, Armadillo's head, and überspacenerd John Carmack was veehee happy:

Since the Lunar Lander Challenge is quite demanding in terms of performance, with a few tweaks our Scorpius vehicle actually has the capability to travel all the way to space. We'll be moving quickly to do higher-altitude tests, and we can go up to about 6000 feet here at our home base in Texas before we'll have to head to New Mexico where we can really push the envelope. We already have scientific payloads from universities lined up to fly as well, so this will be an exciting next few months for commercial spaceflight.

Scorpius was able to complete the challenge, flying the 180 seconds required to escape from the Moon's surface and reach lunar orbit. [Space.com]

Boeing kills things on the ground with lasers

Well, it’s not exactly a surprise, as they’ve been working on it for years, but Boeing just had a successful firing of their aircraft based military laser. So successful in fact, they managed to blow something up.
While not exactly portable (it’s mounted in a C-130) the laser certainly is powerful. The chemical laser consumes as much energy in a 5 second burst as is needed to power an american household for an hour. That’s a whole lot of pew-pew. The system has been in development since 2008, at a cost of approximately $30 million. Good to see that it’s finally been successful.
I wonder if you can use it to make popcorn.