Free-electron lasers are an exciting development for fields ranging from structural biology to nanotechnology. These lasers produce an intense and extremely short burst of X-rays, which could enable the structure of individual organic molecules to be collected without the need to first form them into a crystal (as is the case in conventional X-ray analysis). But the intensity of these pulses is such that they obliterate any sample they irradiate. In this issue, Henry Chapman, Janos Hajdu and colleagues report a proof-of-principle of a technique that reconstructs the image of a sample using scattered X-rays at the beginning of a pulse. Using a single 25-femtosecond soft X-ray pulse generated by the recently completed FLASH free-electron laser, they imaged two micrometre-sized stick figures patterned into a silicon nitride film — just moments before it evaporated at a temperature of 60,000 K.

Letter p839 | News and Views p799