>"When scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory focused the full intensity of the world’s most powerful X-ray laser on a sm

>"When scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory focused the full intensity of the world’s most powerful X-ray laser on a small molecule, they got a surprise: A single laser pulse stripped all but a few electrons out of the molecule’s biggest atom from the inside out, leaving a void that started pulling in electrons from the rest of the molecule, like a black hole gobbling a spiraling disk of matter. Within 30 femtoseconds – millionths of a billionth of a second – the molecule lost more than 50 electrons, far more than scientists anticipated based on earlier experiments using less intense beams or isolated atoms. Then it blew up."