Here’s an interesting “Ted Talk” by Ramesh Raskar from MIT’s Media Lab, in which he describes a technique for taking REALLY high-speed videos – a trillion frames per second. He shows a video in which he images a light pulse propagating through a bottle of water. My immediate reaction was that this had to be a fake, and it sort of is – he does what he calls “computational photography.” He sends out many short pulses of light and takes many images at a given delay time using a boxcar- type system, then averages them. The results are spectacular, however, and he describes some particularly cool applications of this technique.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that_takes_one_trillion_frames_per_second.html

There is a bit more information on his MIT web page:

http://www.media.mit.edu/people/raskar