Clocking Atom-Hopping Electrons

Apparently they use X-ray pulses to measure the time it takes for the electron to travel.

http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/9/7/12/1

Here's the best part, it takes the electron 320 attoseconds to be transferred to the Ruthenium whereas it takes 500 attoseconds for it to fall back from it's excited state, which is why the electron transfer is possible in the first place. I can't even begin to describe the benefits of knowing stuff like this. It's an exciting time for Solid State Physics.

Doesn't the Heisenberg principle state that if you know the speed you can't know the location? Doe that mean that if we know that they move at a (semi) constant speed that we can extrapolate the travel data from the position and knowing the forces causing it to curve?

Sort of. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says you can't know both the position and momentum of a particle. The trick is, in the experiment above, the scientists aren't really measuring an electron traveling from one position to another position. What they are measuring is the electron going from one "state" to another "state". The important difference being that a state is basically a probability curve for the location of an electron, so as you can see the Heisenberg Principle is intact since position is not measured precisely.

But if I know that a electron going from one state to another has a certain mass I can reasonably predict the angular momentum of the electron. If I can then nail down it's position I can then assign it that value. Or is it that I am applying a non-measured attribute to an object that keeps the principle intact?

I think when they measure the speed it takes to go from one state to another, you could think of it more as the time it takes to change from probability state to another, rather than the time it takes an electron to move from one place to another.