Abstract: Rapid transient heat conduction is an emerging area in modern high and new technologies such as ultrashort pulse laser heating, rapid solidification of metals. Under such a condition when the time scale of the heating process is extremely small, the non-Fourier effects in the heat conduction become significant. The advances in the study of mechanisms, modeling, applications and experiments in non-Fourier heat conduction are reviewed in this paper. The topics for further investigations are suggested.