This is the new popular story. In short, MIT Media Lab claims to capture video at 10¹² fps. Here is a video describing the set up.

Really, I wasn’t going to write about this. I figured someone like Tom (Swans on Tea) would point out the problems with this “camera”. Oh well, I guess it is up to me.

How Does it Work?

This is not really one trillion frames per second. Instead, this is more like a strobe effect. You have seen this, right? You know, you take a strobe light and shin it on a guitar string or something. If you get the frequency of the light just right, it will show images of the...

In 1995, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a controversial exhibition entitled “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt,” in which works considered to be genuine Rembrandts were displayed alongside those done by his students and admirers. (These lesser paintings are often dismissed as “the school of Rembrandt.”) The point of the exhibition was to reveal the fine line between genius and imitation, authenticity and fakery.

A hundred years ago, about 700 works were attributed to Rembrandt. Over the course of the 20th century, that number declined by 50 percent, as critics and historians began searching for...