Megapixels are, like, so 2006

Houstonist remembers our first digital camera: It was bulky — at least compared to the one we have now, which we could easily swallow if we weren't being careful — and was capable of producing prints up to the size of a postage stamp. And if you think that's impressive, you should have seen our bag phone! But we digress: The point is, digital cameras have come a long way in the last few years. Too far, if you ask a couple of Rice University engineers who have come up with an alternative to the multimillon-megapixel devices: a one-pixel camera.

The engineers, Richard Baraniuk and Kevin Kelly, thought about how inefficient today's digital cameras are: They capture an image with millions of pixel sensors, but then have to discard up to 99 percent of that information to be able to process images. So they developed a one-pixel camera that can sample 30,000 randomly scattered points of light to capture an image; we have no idea how that works, perhaps because it has something to do with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and quantum mechanics, the lectures on both of which we guess we slept through. But still, it's interesting.

The single-pixel camera takes pretty basic images now, but could be refined in the coming years. And using detectors for nonvisible light, the camera could be used as a sensor to screen luggage for chemicals and explosives.