It has always been impossible to clearly photograph electrons since their extremely high velocities have produced blurry pictures. In order to capture these rapid events, extremely short flashes of light are necessary, but such flashes were not previously available.

With the use of a newly developed technology for generating short pulses from intense laser light, so-called attosecond pulses, scientists at the Lund University Faculty of Engineering in Sweden have managed to capture the electron motion for the first time.

The movie shows how an electron rides on a light wave after just having been pulled away from an atom.

“Antarctica is the ultimate destination for anyone interested in natural history but it also challenges those people who visit to think broadly about our responsibilities to all life on Earth.”

That’s the view of Dr Robert Lambert, a lecturer on Tourism and the Environment at The University of Nottingham, who has just returned from the Antarctic in his role as an Observer for the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO).

Dr Lambert, who is a member of the Business School’s Christel DeHaan Tourism and Travel Research Institute, says the relationship between nature and people is complex and constantly changing and great positives can come from tourism in Antarctica. He believes those lucky enough to experience it could become ambassadors for the region to help develop a ‘constituency’ of support for Antarctica.

American adults have a higher prevalence of stroke than their European counterparts, due in part to a higher rate of stroke risk factors among Americans and barriers to care in the United States, according to a study presented at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference 2008.

Compared to European men, U.S. men had 61 percent higher odds of having a stroke and U.S. women had almost twice the odds of stroke as European women.

“Most of this gap is among relatively poor Americans who were, in our data, much more likely to have a stroke than poor Europeans, whereas the gap in stroke prevalence is less marked between rich Americans and rich Europeans,” said Mauricio Avendano, Ph.D., author of the study. “Risk factors alone do not account for the differences we found, which points to the role of broader healthcare and structural policies.”

HELSINKI, February 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Sigmaview Capital Sdn. Bhd. owner of MSC Trustgate, Malaysia's premier provider of Internet trust solutions, and Valimo Wireless, the market leader in Mobile Signature solutions, have signed an agreement concerning a mobile signature pilot in Malaysia.

MSC Trustgate is the qualified licensed CA (Certification Authority) in Malaysia and has started to expand its service offering to other Asian countries, such as Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Solar cells are constructed of layers that absorb sunlight and convert it to electrical current. Thinner solar cells can yield both cheaper and more plentiful electricity than today's cells, if their capacity to absorb sunlight is optimized.

Electricity-generating solar cells are one of the most attractive alternatives for creating a long-term sustainable energy system, but thus far solar cells have not been able to compete economically with fossil fuels. Researchers are now looking at how nanotechnology can contribute in bringing down the cost.

Scientists at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden say the electrons in nanoparticles of noble metal oscillate together apace with the frequency of the light. This phenomenon can be exploited to produce better and cheaper solar cells.

Drug treatments for depression can take many weeks for the beneficial effects to emerge. The excruciating and disabling nature of depression highlights the urgency of developing treatments that act more rapidly.

Ketamine, a drug used in general medicine as an anesthetic, has recently been shown to produce improvements in depressed patients within hours of administration. A new study being published in the February 15th issue of Biological Psychiatry provides some new insight into the mechanisms by which ketamine exerts its effects.

The downside? It's in the same class of drugs as PCP (phencyclidine).

University of Sussex astronomers predict that the Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun unless the Earth’s orbit can be altered - but we have about 7.6 billion years to do it.

Dr Robert Smith, Emeritus Reader in Astronomy, said his team previously calculated that the Earth would escape ultimate destruction, although be battered and burnt to a cinder, but they did not take into account the effect of the drag caused by the outer atmosphere of the dying Sun.

He says: "We showed previously that, as the Sun expanded, it would lose mass in the form of a strong wind, much more powerful than the current solar wind. This would reduce the gravitational pull of the Sun on the Earth, allowing the Earth's orbit to move outwards, ahead of the expanding Sun.

An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop, itself a thousand times faster than a teraflop. Teraflop computers —the first was developed 10 years ago at Sandia — currently are the state of the art. They do trillions of calculations a second. Exaflop computers would perform a million trillion calculations per second.

Ten years ago, people worldwide were astounded at the emergence of a teraflop supercomputer, Sandia’s ASCI Red, able in one second to perform a trillion mathematical operations. More recently, bloggers seem stunned that a machine capable of petaflop computing — a thousand times faster than a teraflop — could soon break the next barrier of a thousand trillion mathematical operations a second.

STAINES, England, February 22 /PRNewswire/ --

- New Treatment Option Contributes to Fight Against Healthcare Associated Infections

Astellas Pharma Europe Ltd(i) announced today that the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) issued a positive opinion by consensus, recommending a marketing authorisation for Mycamine(R), a treatment for systemic fungal infections, which are very serious, life-threatening conditions.

The CHMP's positive recommendation is a critical step in the approval process, and Astellas expects to obtain the European Commission decision in May.

AMSTERDAM, February 22 /PRNewswire/ --

- FDA Approves IND Application for Reviroc(TM)

Biopharmaceutical Company Kiadis Pharma announced today that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Kiadis Pharma's investigational new drug ("IND") application to allow the start of a clinical phase III study for its product Reviroc(TM) in the United States. Reviroc(TM) is under development for the elimination of cancer cells from an autologous graft in bone marrow transplantations for end-stage blood cancer patients.