SINGLE-SHOT FAR-INFRARED PICTURES. Conventional photography records the visible world at wavelengths of 300-800 nm. Two dimensional images at near-infrared wavelengths (around 1 micron) can also be rendered. Doing spectroscopy or making pictures (and movies) at even longer wavelengths (10-1000 microns or, equivalently, terahertz frequencies) is difficult but desirable. Difficult because there have been no reliable detectors or coherent (laserlike) sources for this undervalued part of the electromagnetic spectrum; desirable because many molecules (in pollutants, diseased tissue, explosives, etc.) rotate and vibrate at energies corresponding to these far infrared (FIR) frequencies (Science, 8 May 1998). Progress is happening on several fronts. For instance, new coherent sources are at hand: scientists at Dartmouth produce FIR radiation by sending the beam from a scanning electron microscope (SEM) across a diffraction grating (Urata et al., Physical Review Letters, 19 January 1998). And at Rensselaer Polytech (Xi-Cheng Zhang, zhangx2@rpi.edu, 518- 276-3079) researchers have been able to make an image of a single THz pulse. That is, they measure the actual waveform---the electric field as a function of time (over a 25 ps period) and space (over a 10 mm span)---of a terahertz burst of radiation. They do this by encoding the THz signal onto a light pulse at optical wavelengths which has been stretched from 200 fs to 20 ps in a process called chirping. The combined signal is later decoded and imaged with a video camera, yielding (for the first time) a real-time image of a THz pulse and not just a sequence of stroboscopic samplings over a long period. This constitutes a step toward real imaging with THz light. (Jiang and Zhang, to be published in Optics Letters, 15 July.)