German scientists have been awarded a Guinness World Record for “fastest movie” after successfully capturing two images of an X-ray laser beam 50 femtoseconds apart. One femtosecond is equal to one quadrillionth (or one millionth of one billionth) of a second. Here’s some science talk explaining it:

[...] the scientists split the X-ray laser beam into two flashes and sent one of them via a detour of only 0.015 millimetres, making it arrive 50 femtoseconds later than the first one. Since no detector can be read out so fast, the scientists stored both images as superimposed holograms, allowing the subsequent reconstruction of the single images.
With these experiments, the scientists showed that this record slow motion is achievable. However, they did not only take the world’s fastest but probably also the shortest film – with just two images. Thus, additional development work is necessary for the use of this method in practice. [#]

And we thought one trillion frames per second was impressive…

(via PhysOrg via Engadget)

Image credit: Photograph by Stefan Eisebitt/HZB

Setting a new Guinness World Record might be a difficult task for us humans, but is apparently much easier if you’re a camera. A bizarre story that emerged this past week was that Casio’s swivel-crazy Tryx has been awarded a Guiness World Record for being the “Most Adjustable Digital Camera“. The description of the world record reads like something out of a press release:

Instead of a traditional block camera body, the 3-in touch screen LCD on the Casio Tryx digital camera is swivel-mounted inside a frame, upon which the lens and flash is affixed. The screen pops out of the frame and can be swivelled 360 degrees around and through the frame in landscape mode, and swivelled simultaneously 360 degrees on its frame-attached stem in portrait mode, creating an almost limitless number of shooting positions and angle combinations. [#]

Take notice, camera makers: if you want to land a ad world record in the Guinness Book, simply make a camera that swivels in a bazillion directions!

Most adjustable digital camera (via Cameratown)

What you see above is the inside of the world’s largest pinhole camera measuring 45x160x80 feet. It’s an abandoned airplane hangar in Irvine, California that was converted over the course of two months into a gigantic pinhole camera. 24,000 square feet of plastic, 1,300 gallons of foam filler, 1.52 miles of tape, and 40 cans of spray paint went into darkening the hangar.
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Two days ago, Sankei News in Japan reported that a Nagoya Institute of Technology team led by Professor Yojiro Ishino was certified by Guinness World Records as having built the “Camera With The Most Lenses”. The camera boasts a staggering 158 separate lenses.

The setup reminds me of the camera array used to shoot the “bullet time” scenes in The Matrix, except rather than having a large number of individual cameras, this setup has a single “camera” with a large number of lenses.

The record-breaking camera took six months to build, and is meant to capture the movement of a flame simultaneously from multiple directions. Each lens cost only 200 yen, which is about $2.26. Thus, the whole collection of lenses cost only about $360.

Kudos if anyone can send us photographs taken with this camera!

(via CrunchGear)

Update: Here’s an image taken with the camera, and some additional photographs of the camera itself. Kudos to Durf for finding this!