Japanese radiologists have created a new super-fast camera that can capture events occurring at one-sixth the speed of light, or roughly 45,000 kilometres per second. Allowing scientists to record more frames per second back-to-back than any other technology, the device will be used to capture the body's physical and biological processes in far more detail than ever before.

Called STAMP, the camera can record events at a speed of more than 1-trillion-frames-per-second, which is more than 1,000 times faster than a conventional high-speed camera. "[It] holds great promise for studying a diverse range of previously unexplored complex ultrafast phenomena," one of the team, radiologist Keiichi Nakagawa from the University of Tokyo, said in a press release.

The technology works by splitting a single light pulse into a fast barrage of rainbow-coloured smaller pulses. This process is called dispersion, and it's what we see when we observe rainbows in the sky. According to the press release, "Each separate colour flash can then be analysed to string together a moving picture of what the object looked like over the time it took the dispersed light pulse to travel through the device."