Using a combination of femtosecond spectroscopy with electron microscopy techniques, the flow of electrons on femtosecond timescales was tracked. First, an ultrafast laser beam was used to excite the electron sample. Following this, another ultrafast laser beam was shone upon the sample to track the evolution of the excited electrons. The combination of the two methods has allowed the scientists to record this movie where electrons can be seen being directed to flow in opposite directions.

OIST Presidential Lecture Series "Towards Image-Based Systems Biology" by Dr. Eugene W. Meyers September 25, 2018 ABSTRACT Our group has been actively pursuing the idea that with great microscopes and great computer science we will be able to build digital models or atlases of the individual cells of a small organism, such as a worm or fly embryo, operating through time.  Moreover, microscope observations of glowing, fluorescently-labelled molecules within each cell will give us information about the molecular state of every cell in the atlas so that we can begin to investigate how they are coordinating their activity within the subject organism.  We believe that the resulting ability to inspect these atlases from any vantage point in space and time, and as a cellular system, will lead to many discoveries about the nature of the genetic control of the development and functioning of an organism. Achieving the technological goal will require advances in microscopy, advances in computer vision and image analysis, and last, but not least, advances in systems for curating the data.  Our group is striving to make advances in all three facets, and we will present our progress to date.  With a series of examples, we will make the following points: 1.    The need for a curation system that allows a human user to fix mistakes in the output of the computer analysis is essential, and such a system must be leveraged, allowing the correction of several mistakes with a single clue, and have attentional focusing, bringing the eye of the user to the locations in the model that potentially need fixing. 2.    Better imagery, especially deep into tissues, will only be obtained with microscopes that (a) employ powerful signal processing, (b) can automatically adjust the microscope components controlling the image capture (e.g. focus), and (c) can effectively shape the excitation beams and camera image with adaptive-optics mirrors whose shape can be adjusted dynamically under computer control.  We have recently had considerable success with deep neural nets and a self-adjusting light-sheet microscope. 3.    An emerging trend is to make microscopes “smart”, in that they have an on-board artificial intelligence (AI) that analyzes images while they are being acquired and based on the analyses, makes decisions about what part of an object to image and how to image it in the next time period.  There are many interesting design possibilities in this sphere, a few of which we will present. SHORT BIOGRAPHY In 2012 Gene Myers joined a growing group of computational biologists in Dresden as the founding director of a new Systems Biology Center that is being built as part of an extension of the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG). His group focuses on engineering specialized light microscopes for cell biology and analyzing the imagery produces by such microscopes. Previously Gene had been a group leader at the HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC) since its inception in 2005. Gene came to the JFRC from UC Berkeley where he was on the faculty of Computer Science from 2003 to 2005. From 1998 to 2002 he was the Vice President of Informatics Research at Celera Genomics where he and his team determined the sequences of the Drosophila, Human, and Mouse genomes using the whole genome shotgun technique that he advocated in 1996. Prior to that Gene was on the faculty of the University of Arizona for 17 years and he received his Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Colorado in 1981. His research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms for problems in computational molecular biology, image analysis of bioimages, and light microscopy with a focus on building models of the cell and cellular systems from imaging data. He is best known for the development of  BLAST -- the most widely used tool in bioinformatics, and for the paired-end whole genome shotgun sequencing protocol and the assembler he developed at Celera that delivered the fly, human, and mouse genomes in a three year period. He has also written many seminal papers on the theory of sequence comparison. He was awarded the IEEE 3rd Millenium Achievement Award in 2000, the Newcomb Cleveland Best Paper in Science award in 2001, and the ACM Kanellakis Prize in 2002. He was voted the most influential in bioinformatics in 2001 by Genome Technology Magazine and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003. In 2004 he won the International Max- Planck Research Prize and in 2005 was selected as one of two distinguished alumni (with David Haussler) at his alma-mater, the University of Colorado. In 2006 Gene was inducted into Leopoldina, the German Academy of Science and awarded an honorary doctorate at ETH, Zurich.

Red microbeads indicate the flow of food particles into the digestive tract of the tunicate Ciona intestinalis Type A.

OIST Presidential Lecture Series #2 "Animal Beauty: Function and Evolution of Biological Aesthetics" by Dr. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard July 30, 2018 Where do we come from?  What is the point of beauty in nature?  How do we arise from a single cell?  These questions and more will be addressed by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, a pioneer who together with Eric Wieschaus identified the genetic basis for the development of the fruit fly.  For this fundamental discovery she was awarded the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995, jointly with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard helped decipher the logic of the genes required to control early embryonic development.  Based on her research, a plethora of transcription control genes was discovered and found to be conserved throughout evolution.  In her talk she will discuss the basic mechanisms needed to establish a distinct pattern of cells during embryogenesis.  She will also talk about the point of beauty in nature as well as why animals have patterns, a subject on which she has been writing a book.  Her research laid the conceptual foundation for our understanding of organ formation and regeneration using the developmental control genes. From 1985 until 2014 Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard was a director at the Max Planck Institute of Developmental Biology at Tübingen, Germany. As Emerita, she is still leading a research group at the Institute focusing on pattern formation, growth and cell migration in the zebrafish, a new vertebrate model organism. For the discovery of genes that control development in animals and humans, and the demonstration of morphogen gradients in the fly embryo, she received a number of awards and honours, among others the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (New York/USA) in 1991 and the 1995 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. She was secretary general of EMBO until 2009 and a member of many scientific councils (National Ethics Council of Germany, European Research Council). Since 2013 she is chancellor of the German Order Pour le mérite. In order to support women with children in science she founded the Christiane-Nüsslein-Volhard-Stiftung in 2004.

OIST Presidential Lecture Series #1 "The Dark Side of the Universe" by Hitoshi Murayama 2018/07/04 As a first of OIST Presidential Lecture Series, Dr. Hitoshi Murayama, Director of Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, the University of Tokyo, talks about Dark Matter and Dark Energy, which are considered to make up 95% of the Universe. Dark Matter is a part of the reason why we exist. There is plenty of evidence that dark matter exists in our own galaxy, other galaxies, and in clusters of galaxies. On the other hand, Dark Energy is speeding up the expansion of the Universe, and it may even lead the Universe to become infinitely fast and come to an end. Dr. Murayama discusses what researchers are doing, and trying to understand what these are. Dr. Murayama received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Tokyo in 1991, held research positions at Tohoku University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and has been on faculty at University of California, Berkeley since 1995. Currently he is a senior staff member at LBNL and MacAdams Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2007, he has also been the founding director of Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo. He received the 2002 Yukawa Commemoration Prize and the 2017 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Science Council of Japan. Nature’s deep puzzles - from eccentric particles to dark matter to why our universe is expanding faster - are what he strives to solve.

High speed video showing experimental impacts on three textured granular surfaces.

This movie, showing the movements of many integrin molecules, is fast-forwarded by a factor of six from real time. The focal adhesion is shown in blue while the green spots represent single integrin molecules. The yellow lines show the trajectory of the integrin molecule. In addition to movement, it exhibited temporary immobilization shown in red, which the researchers termed Temporary Arrest of LateraL diffusion (TALL).

At time 0, the numbers of fluorescent molecules are about the same in both movies. The number decreases rapidly in the video on the left which employed a conventional observation method, whereas the number of fluorescent spots decreases very slowly in the video shown on the right, which was recorded using the newly developed method. See the spots jostle around in the cell membrane.

Many people came to the OIST Science Festival 2017 to enjoy the world of science.

This video, taken at 500 frames per second, shows the Marangoni effect in action. The researchers introduced a surfactant—a liquid with lower surface tension—to the surface of water. They used hollow glass spheres, which naturally float at the water surface, so a camera could capture the process. (Video: Mahesh Bandi)

For generations, researchers have thought about ecology in terms of the landscape. Now, new technology and methods are allowing scientists to record and examine the particular "soundscape" of a place.