The Ultimate “Flash Photography”

ScienceNow : Smile and prepare to be vaporized! In what you might call the most violent snap-shot ever, physicists have used a blast of x-rays to determine the structure of a tiny object, even as the x-rays blew it apart. The “single-shot” technique marks an important step toward deciphering the structure of proteins by zapping just a single molecule--a potentially revolutionary technique that physicists hope to perfect with the world’s first x-ray lasers, currently under construction in the U.S., Germany, and Japan.