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Gamma rays are the most energetic light in the Universe. But one part of them, the medium-energy range, long remained invisible: instruments couldn't catch them, leaving a gaping hole in the sky. Scientists call it the "MeV gap," named after the unit of energy these rays carry. The new camera works like a three-layer detective.

Light that never reaches the camera still leaves its mark on it. That's how the new imaging method works: you illuminate the object with one color, and the picture is assembled from another. Inside the crystal, light waves mix, and information about the invisible transfers to a visible beam. In the experiment, they used a silver thiogallate crystal.

In 2019, the world saw the first image of a black hole's shadow — an orange doughnut on a black background, becoming a symbol of scientific progress. But this image wasn't captured by a camera: it was born from mathematical alchemy, where data from eight radio telescopes, which gathered only crumbs of signal, merged into a single picture.

Assessing image quality is a job for a meticulous inspector with a toolbox. The IQA-T1 neural network acts exactly like that: it doesn't just stare at the picture, but applies either a spectroscope or a light meter.

At the center of galaxy M87, 55 million light-years away, lurks a black hole with a mass of 6.5 billion Suns. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) gave us its first portrait: an orange donut with a dark core. But the donut is not the abyss itself.

The universe is like a vast warehouse where a strict inventory was taken long ago. The cosmic microwave background is an ancient record of everything in stock 380,000 years after the big bang. According to it, the fraction of matter in the cosmic 'budget' (the parameter Omega_m) is known with high precision.

Any light measurement runs into a fundamental limit: photons hit the camera sensor unevenly. This natural ripple (shot noise) blurs fine details, like trying to pick out a quiet instrument in an orchestra through the noise of the hall.

An ordinary rain gauge collects water in a bucket and shows the total volume of precipitation. But the new device is like a sensitive palm that feels every falling drop and keeps count, even when the drops number in the thousands. That's exactly what physicists have built.

Two musicians in separate rooms play the same note. The sound must be so identical that a listener can't tell who is playing. In the quantum world, these musicians are single-photon sources — particles of light that must be indistinguishable from one another.

A drummer stays silent, but from the pauses you can tell where he didn’t hit. Similarly, physicists built an image by catching not light, but moments of absolute darkness. The picture emerged from silence. In the experiment, they shone light from an ordinary lamp onto the object.

In giant accelerators, particles zip through detectors in billionths of a second, and telling one from another requires a stopwatch of incredible precision. The new µRWELL-PICOSEC detector acts as such a stopwatch: it captures the moment a particle passes with a precision of 48 picoseconds: that's 48 trillionths of a second.

In the dark, a tiny spark flashes. A gamma ray born inside a patient's body strikes a crystal and knocks out a shower of light. The detector's job is to figure out exactly where that happened. The more precise the answer, the sharper the image on the tomograph screen. The new detector resembles a honeycomb, but not a flat one — the cells narrow toward the bottom.

Light passing through a stained cell loses some of its strength, like a flashlight beam cutting through a glass of tea. The denser the color, the more light is absorbed. But until now, a microscope could only show a flat shadow of this process, not its volume.

Astronomers read the history of galaxies by their portraits. Previously, they used either lengthy analysis of light by colors or quick filtered snapshots, losing the details of shape.