Several countries suffer from the existence of millions of buried landmines in their territories. These landmines have indefinite life, and may still cause horrific personal injuries and economic dislocation for decades after a war has finished.   Landmines, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and other homemade bombs struck 6,461 people worldwide …

The ability to observe events on such timescales is important for basic physics — to understand how atoms move within molecules — as well as for engineering semiconductor devices, and for understanding basic biological processes at the molecular level. Today, researchers can easily reach into the realm of femtoseconds — quadrillionths …