In this rather unassuming movie, released over the weekend, you can see something human eyes have never gazed on before: a 200-nanometer-wide channel opening and closing in a semiconductor crystal. This event was captured at CalTech with an ultrafast electron microscope and slowed down considerably for video. In real life, the channel would open and shut in just a few femtoseconds, which are one thousanth of a trillionth of a second. Yeah. Pretty fucking fast. What this means is that now scientists can make video of nanoscale events, both in size and time. Previously, they could only take stills. In the Niche of Time [Chemical and Engineering News]
