Scientific American on Detecting Photo Manipulations

Link: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=5-ways-to-spot-a-fake

Composite images made of pieces from different photographs can display subtle differences in the lighting conditions under which each person or object was originally photographed. Such discrepancies will often go unnoticed by the naked eye.

I found this article from Scientific American rather interesting (all on one page here). Basically, they point out five things that might be a little out-of-whack with faked photos:

1. Different light source directions
2. Eye shape and position
3. Specular highlights
4. Cloning
5. Color Filter Array fingerprinting

This might be a fascinating read if you've ever had... doubts... about a photograph.

FREE BONUS LINK, also from Scientific American:

Researchers hope to send an experiment to the International Space Station (ISS) by the middle of the next decade that would pave the way for transcontinental transmission of secret messages encoded using the mysterious quantum property of entanglement.

Mmmm, entanglement.