Featured image: Scott Andrews and his first creation the SC1, custom-built for measuring visible light signals at extreme speeds. (Courtesy Titan Labs)
This week, Scott Andrews of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Titan Labs joins us to share his work on developing superfast cameras for scientific measurements. If your camera is too slow, the event you’re trying to see is too blurry to understand—and tracking the motions of atoms occurring in quadrillionths of a second is hard with any present-day technology. Scott is developing improvements to streak cameras, which convert light into electrons in order to measure events on the picosecond or femtosecond time scale. Hear how he does it, plus the benefits of thinking through design from different perspectives.
In other news, tree lobsters are on the up-and-up in the insect world, and their aggressively long tails seem to be for pinning down down rivals, not mates.
The playlist can be found at WPRB.com or below.
These Vibes Are Too Cosmic 