Straight out of a CSI Episode...The Gigapixel Camera[/caption] Thought 36.3 megapixels was going overboard? Welcome the colossus; the gluttonous king among the pixel empire who scoffs at your puny pixel count...OK maybe I'm getting a little too excited, but this is some big news. Those crazy science folks over at Duke University have created a camera that can capture 1,000 Megapixel images. Yes, that's 1 Gigapixel. My spell check can't even comprehend what a gigapixel is. They're calling it the Aware-2 and it weighs in at a whopping 100 pounds thanks to all the on-board electronics. This technology utilizes a series of microcameras that capture and stitch together 5x more information than your eye in only 18 seconds. Stitching together large images to make massive sized panoramics is nothing new, but this camera solves the past problems of pesky geometric aberrations and long processing times. Finally, they've created a camera that can read the fine print of a post stamp from a half mile away...come to think of it, that seems kind of invasive. We can expect these cameras to be invading your privacy keeping you safe in the not-so-distant future via security cameras. Right now the technology required to run this machine is much too big and expensive for commercial use, but considering that the microcameras they use are not unlike the ones we have in our smartphones, we might see gigapixel cameras in a much smaller package. Before we further increase our list of first-world problems with massive file sizes blowing up our hard drives, perhaps we should be more concerned with these Aware-2 cameras becoming self-aware.