 Our aim is to make movies of molecular machines that work. These things have a job to do, and we want to see how they work. Inside every cell, the engines of life are proteins. They drive biology, and when they break down, could profoundly affect our health. But for most proteins, we don't know how they work. That's because, up until now, scientists didn't have a camera with enough power or speed to take images of proteins in action. But that's about to change. Researchers at ASU are building a powerful new tool, the compact X-ray free electron laser. Advances in particle physics now allow us to aim extremely high speed pulses of X-ray lasers at molecules. Each pulse allows a momentary snapshot of the protein, and by stringing these snapshots together, we can create movies of the proteins at work. But in order to build it, researchers have to do something that has never been done before. To take a particle accelerator, a high-energy physics research instrument that is usually two miles long, and make one small enough to fit in a basement. We take that football field of magnets and shrink it down by converting it into a laser. And our laser pulse, instead of being 100 yards long, is 100 microns. And that's about the diameter of one of your hairs. And that shakes the electrons so hard that they can be at much lower energy, which means that we don't need that giant accelerator now. We can make it with something that's just a couple of feet long. The key is shaping the electrons into a pattern before they are hit with a powerful laser blast. The electrons go through this laser pulse, and so it makes the charged particles wiggle back and forth. And when they wiggle, they make X-rays. For the first time, researchers will have a compact X-ray source right at their fingertips. This could unlock the mysteries of photosynthesis and create new discoveries in renewable energy. And in medicine, insights into how a new drug could work better in the body, leading to fewer side effects. It may even lead to a new type of medical imaging technology for hard-to-treat diseases like cancer. And it won't be just ASU researchers in the lab who will benefit. Because we came up with these ideas and ASU had the vision to execute this project, we're going to be the first ones to develop these compact X-fells. We think they'll spread throughout the world after we demonstrate this first one. Richard Feynman once said that life consists of the wiggling and jiggling of atoms. Well, we want to see those wiggles and jiggles because they actually correspond to life itself.