In the 1870s, photographer Eadweard Muybridge conducted an experiment at Stanford that laid the foundation for the production of motion pictures. He developed a technique that allowed him to take a sequence of photographs capturing a trotter’s movement. Left: Stanford’s horse Sallie Gardner gallops over the Palo Alto track. In 2009, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s LINAC Coherent Light Source at Stanford was launched to capture the world’s fastest microscopic X-ray images, enabling many molecular processes to be seen for the first time. These pictures can then be compiled to make movies of molecules in motion. Scientists from around the world come to use this tool.