World's most powerful x-ray machine

After years of design and construction, the world's brightest X-ray machine has come to life at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, in the hills near Stanford University. The mile-long machine produces a probing laser beam made of X-rays instead of visible light. Its laser bursts are so bright and so brief that researchers will use them as an ultrafast stop-motion camera to capture the minute details of things previously unseen, such as the arrangement of atoms in metals, semiconductors, ceramics, polymers and proteins.