Bursting High-Speed Photography by Alan Sailer

These amazing high speed photographs are the work of Alan Sailer, who is based in California, USA. A normal photographic flash unit gives a flash that lasts around a thousandth of a second (a millisecond). However Alan's flash unit is much faster than this, and produces a flash of light around a microsecond (a millionth of a second). This allows him to freeze things that are happening extremely fast, and to give us a view of something that otherwise we would never see.

Check out the below gallery for a sample of these breathtaking images of exploding strawberries, glass ornaments, paintballs, tomatoes, crayons, walnuts and grapes.

Alan used an air rifle, a Nikon D40 camera and a homemade one-microsecond flash unit that cost around $300. For context, a typical camera flash is one-thousandth of a second, compared to the one-millionth of a second of this special flash unit.

Red Bull Flugtag 2009

Red Bull makes full use of its "Red Bull gives you wings" slogan by hosting this year's Flugtag in London's Hyde Park. Anyone wondering what a Flugtag is should refer to the famous Bognor Birdman event. If you're still in the dark, it's basically about man's eternal battle with gravity, coupled with an extraordinary willingness to look stupid.

Forty teams take part and spectators can see the daredevil pilots "flying" their man-powered craft from a 20-foot high ramp over/into the murky waters below. The celebrity panel judge entries based on flight distance, creativity of the machine and the pre-flight performance, plus the crowd clap-o-meter.