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Scientists have filmed an electron in motion for the first time, using a new technique that will allow researchers to study the tiny particle’s movements directly.

Previously it was impossible to photograph electrons because of their extreme speediness, so scientists had to rely on more indirect methods. These methods could only measure the effect of an electron’s movement, whereas the new technique can capture the entire event.

Extremely short flashes of light are necessary to capture an electron in motion. A technology developed within the last few years can generate short pulses of intense laser light, called attosecond pulses, to get the job done.

“It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. An attosecond is 10^-18 seconds long, or, expressed in another way: an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe,” said Johan Mauritsson of Lund University in Sweden.

Using another laser, scientists can guide the motion of the electron to capture a collision between an electron and an atom on film.

The length of the film Mauritsson and his colleagues made corresponds to a single oscillation of a wave of light . The speed of the event has been slowed down for human eyes. The results are detailed in the latest issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Mauritsson says the technique could also be used to study what happens in an atom when an electron leaves its shell.

I have a metal change jar where I save my change, and every couple of months when the jar is full, I jaunt down to the local Post Office and marvel at my newfound fortune. It’s not exactly free money, but it feels like free money, and the lunch I purchase with it tastes all the sweeter.Well, you can call me petty, but finding out that someone in America just exchanged their collection of 301 pennies for 10.7 million dollars has officially ruined that ritual for me. I loathe my change jar now.

I glare at it whenever I walk in as if to say “oh, it’s you.” I resent its laziness and wonder aloud to people whether it’s even worth the trip to cash in. “What can you buy with twelve pounds in today’s economy anyway?” I ask, glancing down at the jar. Sometimes when I’m drunk I scream at it to “get a job” and knock it to the ground, scattering near-worthless pennies everywhere.

Admittedly, the guy’s penny collection included one that was only minted for two weeks in 1793 because Congress thought Lady Liberty looked frightened, but does that really warrant the exchange of millions? What service has been rendered here?

The only thing that makes it okay is that the guy was the owner of an aerospace-part manufacturing company. That it means he was probably already rich, so the ten million will be just as worthless to him as my shiftless, scheming change jar is to me.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be scrupulously examining my change trying to find a picture of The Queen looking pensive.

Contrary to popular assumption, DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for seconds to minutes after power is lost, even at operating temperatures and even if removed from a motherboard. Although DRAMs become less reliable when they are not refreshed, they are not immediately erased, and their contents persist sufficiently for malicious (or forensic) acquisition of usable full-system memory images. This phenomenon limits the ability of an operating system to protect cryptographic key material from an attacker with physical access. Cold reboots can be used to mount attacks on popular disk encryption systems — BitLocker, FileVault, dm-crypt, and TrueCrypt — using no special devices or materials. We experimentally characterise the extent and predictability of memory remanence and report that remanence times can be increased dramatically with simple techniques. New algorithms are available for finding cryptographic keys in memory images and for correcting errors caused by bit decay.

Full research paper [PDF]

Introductory blog post

Frequently asked questions

Experiment guide

Videos and images

Someday in the distant future, children will be hugging their Microsoft Robot Friend, browsing the Weboverse on Internet Explorer 29, and going to a rock concert held by Steve Ballmer’s head, and they’ll have never known the nasty Microsoft we grew up with. Starting today, Microsoft has dropped a bit of a bombshell on the computing community by jumping on the “open” bandwagon and altering the way they do business with third-party developers. According to a wordy press release issued by the company, Redmond will begin embracing an open attitude by publishing documentation for all of its “high-volume product” APIs free of charge, will detail patents it holds and applications that cover its protocols (to avoid nasty, Linux-like mixups, we assume), and will provide a “covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols.” Sound like big news? They’ve got a lot more to say on the matter — click here and learn all about cuddly new Microsoft.

(I never thought I’d put a post in to both the categories, “Free Software” and “Microsoft”.)