M. Scott Brauer

Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, left, and Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar with the experimental setup they used to produce slow-motion video of light scattering through a plastic bottle.

A new imaging system that captures visual data at a rate of one-trillion-frames per second is fast enough to create virtual super-slow-motion videos of light particles traveling and scattering through space.

For reference, light particles — photons — travel about a million times faster than a speeding bullet.

In the video above, for example, a burst of laser light is seen traveling through a soda bottle and bouncing off the cap. Other videos show a ripple of laser light move across a table, over and into a tomato, and up a wall.

"What you see in the videos is an average of many pulses," Andreas Velten, a researcher in MIT's Media Lab who is leading the effort, explained to me Tuesday. "If we capture one pulse, we don't get enough information. First of all because it is too faint and second because we only see one line at a time." 

The technique to create the videos relies on what's called a streak camera. The aperture — opening — of this camera is a narrow slit that provides a reasonable field of view in the horizontal direction, but very limited view in the vertical — essentially a line, or row of pixels. 

"It can only see one line, but it gives you a very high frame rate — a trillion-frames-per second," Velten said. This allows the researchers to make a movie of one scan line. Several pulses of light are used to compose each scan line movie to improve image quality, he noted.

Then, a system of mirrors in front of the camera changes the field of view slightly so that a movie of the next line can be made. The process continues for each line of a scene, such as a pulse of light moving through a bottle. Then, the computer uses all this information to create the virtual slow-motion movies.

"So what you are seeing is actually an average of many pulses, but because our camera and laser are synchronized very well, all the pulses look exactly the same," Velten said. "That's basically the trick."

According to the researchers, it takes only a nanosecond — a billionth of a second — for light to scatter through a bottle, but it takes nearly an hour to collect enough data to stitch together a video.

While watching photons move through soda bottles and across tables is visually cool and educational, the technology could be used to study the properties of materials, as well in scientific and medical imaging, even "ultrasound with light," the researchers suggest.

For more on this technology, check out the video below featuring Velten and his adviser, Ramesh Raskar. 

More on high-tech camera technology:

• New camera always takes perfectly focused photos
• Foam ball snaps panoramic images in the air
• Smart fiber can act as a camera
• Insects, animals captured with high-speed photography

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Thibault Camus / AP

In this file photo, tourists pose in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. A computer can match up photos and paintings based on the uniqueness of features such as the Eiffel Tower.

Every year, thousands of tourists stand in front of Paris' Eiffel Tower to have their picture taken, painted, or sketched. Though every image is different, each contains the sky piercing tower. Now, a computer can match up all those images based on that one identifying feature.

This could be useful, for example, to someone who is wondering how the Eiffel Tower and its surroundings have changed since their grandparents had their picture painted in front of it on their honeymoon. In this case, the computer could find a match to the painting by searching online for a modern match.

The technique differs from photo-matching methods that focus on similarities in shapes, colors, or composition, which work well when searching for exact or very close matches but fail when applied across domains, such as a picture taken in different seasons or a painting and a picture.

In the video below that explains how this all works, for example, a standard computer algorithm tasked to find images similar to a painting of a temple returns images of clouds and the ground that most closely match the image, not the temple that's of most interest to humans.

Efros and his colleagues programmed a computer to find the unique element that sets an image apart from others in a sample and then uses that uniqueness to match it with similar images. 

The uniqueness is computed based on a dataset of randomly selected images. So, to use the Eiffel Tower example, the person standing in front of the tower is likely similar to other people in other photos and thus given little weight, but the tower itself is unlike anything else in the other photos.

Efros said the approach is the "best approximation" yet achieved to how humans compare images.

The technique can be used for automated image searches, for example, or combined with a GPS-tagged photo collection to determine where a particular painting of a landmark such as the Eiffel Tower was painted.

In the following video, the team shows off how the program can also be used to assemble what they call a "visual memex" — a dataset that explores the visual similarities and contexts of a set of photos. It shows a graph of 200 images of Medici Fountain, another Paris landmark, from various distances. 

More on photo matching technology:

• Police use facial recognition technology to match rioters
• How to turn off Facebook's creepy face recognition
• Google image search can't tell Obama from Bush
• U.S. spies seek geotagging software

Efros and colleagues will present their findings Dec. 14 at SIGGRAPH Asia, a computer graphics and interactive techniques conference in Hong Kong.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Northrop Grumman Corp.

The availability of two X-47B unmanned aircraft enables the UCAS-D program to conduct a faster and more productive flight test program.

Two is better than one, especially when it comes to flight testing a stealth drone designed to take off and land from moving aircraft carriers at sea. The U.S. Navy announced today it has reached that milestone in its X-47B program.

The second tail-less unmanned aircraft — named Air Vehicle 2 — took to the skies from Edwards Air Force Base in California on Nov. 22 and flew a few racetrack patterns over Rogers Dry Lake at an altitude of 5,000 feet, said Northup Grumman, who is building the plane, in a news release.

Having a second plane will allow for the collection of more performance data and keep the program on development schedule, the aerospace company said. 

Northrop Grumman Corp.

The second X-47B demonstrator aircraft for the Navy's UCAS-D program completed its first flight on Nov. 22 at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.

The computer-controlled unmanned aircraft takes off and flies a pre-programmed mission and then returns to base in response to mouse clicks from a mission operator. The operator monitors the flight, but doesn't actively control it remotely, as for other drones.

One of the twin aircraft will transition to the Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., by the end of 2011, to begin testing of precision carrier approaches, arresting landings and "roll-out" catapult landings, according to the release. 

The tests will also include testing of recently installed guidance, navigation and control software that will enable the aircraft to land on a moving carrier deck, considered among the harshest aviation environments.

The second craft will remain in California to continue envelop expansion flights, which are used to demonstrate the aircraft performance under a range of range, speed, and fuel-load conditions. 

The first carrier launches are planned for 2013 and autonomous refueling demonstrations are slated for 2014. 

More on Navy technology:

• UFO-like drone hits cruise mode
• New, stealthy Navy drone makes its maiden flight
• Navy gets fix for speed need
• Navy sees spying, not flying, future with drones

Getty Images / Getty Images

Pakistanis and international and local media gather outside Osama Bin Laden's compound, where he was killed during a raid by U.S. Special Forces on May 3 in Abottabad, Pakistan. Bin Laden was killed during a U.S. military mission May 2)

Osama bin Laden regularly taunted with propaganda photos and videos that left us asking: where in the world is he? U.S. spy agencies want software that analyzes and quickly identifies where such imagery was made.

Currently, human intelligence analysts pore over propaganda imagery to tease out clues from things such as the geography, vegetation and even the style of clothes worn and gadgets used, and try to match them up with existing images taken from satellites and on the ground.

But this is "an extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive activity that often meets with limited success," notes the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency in its announcement for the Finder Program.

The agency is the intelligence community's DARPA, the secretive military research agency that funds similar futuristic-sounding initiatives such as machines that are able to think for themselves.

Computer programmers have already come up with a bunch of fancy tools to manipulate and find information in images, including animation software to trace faces through the years, Facebook's facial recognition program , and a search engine that IDs stars in photos of the night sky.

Google recently launched an image search engine billed as being able to do the type of task IARPA wants, but it's full of kinks. It can't even distinguish George W. Bush from Barack Obama. Reverse image search engine TinyEye  is designed to perform a similar function.

IARPA says these types of consumer-oriented systems are limited because they "tend to work best in geographic areas with significant population densities or that are well traveled by tourists, and where the query image or video contains notable features such as mountains or buildings."

The Finder Program, as its wished-for software is called, "will deliver rigorously tested solutions for the image/video geolocation task in any outdoor terrestrial location."

Work on the program is scheduled to kick off in earnest next January. That hoped-for solution isn't expected until 2016. But when it comes, and even as researchers work on the task, terrorists will have to be ever more careful about what to include in their propaganda imagery.

Tip o' the Log to The Telegraph.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data

The Nabro volcano has been erupting in the African nation of Eritrea since June 13. This image made with data from a NASA satellite is giving scientists one of their most detailed views of the remote, little-studied volcano.

A NASA satellite captured this spectacular false-color image of the Nabro volcano erupting in a remote region of the northeastern African country of Eritrea.

The bright red portions of the image indicate hot surfaces, NASA explains in an advisory. That's why the hot volcanic ash spewing out of the volcano's caldera glows red.

To the west of the ash cloud, portions of the lava flow are visible. The front edge is particularly hot, thus red. The speckled bits upstream in the lava flow are likely regions where the cool, hardened crust is splitting and exposing fluid lava as the flow advances.

The volcano is located in an isolated region of Eritrea near its border with Ethiopia. Scientists believe it began erupting on June 13. Ash from the volcano has disrupted flights and cut short Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's recent trip to Africa.

Despite these impacts, scientists say they know very little about the volcano. When it was first detected, in fact, scientists thought it was the nearby Dubbi volcano. Imagery such as this photo from NASA's Earth Observing-1 satellite acquired on June 24 is providing the most detailed look at the eruption to date.

More on African volcanoes:

• Airlines watching East Africa volcanic ash cloud
• Volcanic eruption cuts short Clinton African trip
• Giant crack in Africa may create a new ocean
• Science explodes at African lake

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

ESA / DLR / FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

Three frames from the series of 104 taken by Mars Express during the Phobos–Jupiter conjunction on 1 June 2011.

Alignments of planets, moons and stars as seen from Earth always get us excited. This close-up view of the Martian moon Phobos lined up with Jupiter ups the ante – it was seen by a spacecraft orbiting Mars.

Phobos is only 23 kilometers wide, whereas Jupiter is 142,000 kilometers across, but at the moment of the alignment on June 1, the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter was only 11,389 kilometers away from the lumpy moon. Jupiter was a further 529 million kilometers away.

The High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express was kept fixed on Jupiter for the conjunction, ensuring that the planet remained static in the frame. The operation returned a total of 104 images over a period of 68 seconds, all of them taken using the camera’s super-resolution channel.

These images have been stitched together as a movie, seen below.

Beyond the cool factor of the chance alignment, the observations are helping astronomers refine their knowledge about the orbit of Phobos, which varies with time because of its small mass and extreme proximity to Mars, the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla explains.

Mars Express is studying Phobos to help out the planned Russian Phobos-Grunt mission to land a spacecraft on the moon and snag a sample for return to Earth, which is due for launch in November.

More on Phobos:

• Orbiter gets a fresh 3-D look at Phobos 
• Martian moon in spotlight 
• Martian moons pictured together for first time 
• Phobos likely forged by catastrophic blast 

ESO

This picture of the Meathook Galaxy was taken by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla, Chile. This view includes the whole galaxy and the surrounding sky, and clearly shows the asymmetric spiral arms. The longer of the two arms has intense star formation, which is visible here as a pink glow.

Two complementary views of the so-called Meathook Galaxy, released today, show how astronomers are piecing together the history of this lopsided group of stars.

The galaxy, located about 50 million light years away in the southern constellation Volans (The Flying Fish), is recognized for its asymmetrical spiral arms. One is tightly folded in on itself and host to a recent supernova, and the other is dotted with new star formation and extends far out from the nucleus. 

NASA / ESA / ESO

This close-up Hubble view of the Meathook Galaxy focuses on the more compact of its two asymmetric spiral arms as well as the central regions. The spiral arm was the location of a supernova that exploded in 1999. These Hubble observations were made in 2006 in order to study the aftermath of this supernova. Ground-based data from MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope were used to fill out parts of the edges of this image.

The broa- view image above was taken by the Wide Field Imager the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile. It clearly shows the double hook shape that gives NGC 2442, as it the galaxy is officially known, its nickname.

The lopsided appearance is thought to be due to the gravitational interactions of another galaxy, though the culprit remains unknown, the European Space Agency noted in an image advisory. This interaction is probably responsible for an episode of recent star formation, seen as the patches of pink and red, particularly in the longer of the two spiral arms.

These colors come from hydrogen gas in star forming regions, ESA explains. As the powerful radiation of newborn stars excites the gas in the clouds they formed from, it glows in a bright shade of red.

The close-up view from the Hubble Space Telescope focuses on the nucleus of the Meathook and the more compact of its two spiral arms. Not seen in the image is a massive star that exploded at the end of its life in a supernova, witnessed in 1999. By comparing older ground-based observations, previous Hubble images and these made in 2006, astronomers have been able to study the details of the star's violent death. By the time this image was made, the supernova had faded.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).