Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have built a superconducting camera containing 400,000 pixels – 400 times more than any other device of its type. Superconducting cameras allow scientists to capture very weak light signals, whether from distant objects in space or parts of the human brain. The NIST camera is made up of grids of superconducting nanowires, cooled to near absolute zero, in which current moves with no resistance until a wire is struck by a photon. Combining all the locations and intensities of all the photons makes up an image.
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