The way time is measured is on the edge of a historic upgrade. At the heart of this change is a new kind of atomic clock that uses light instead of microwaves. This shift means timekeeping could ...

A clock built by a team led by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been estimated to be 41 percent more accurate than the previous timekeeping record holder.

Considering that 90% of American adults own mobile phones, the practice of interrupting strangers to inquire about the time has almost completely disappeared. Since these devices are so prolific in ...

Picture a clock ticking so steadily that it doesn’t lose a second, even after running for 1 billion years. Scientists are now closer than ever to realizing that level of timekeeping precision, new ...

At this point, atomic clocks are old news. They’ve been quietly keeping our world on schedule for decades now, and have been through several iterations with each generation gaining more accuracy. They ...

The field of optical atomic clocks, in combination with ultracold atoms, has transformed precision timekeeping and metrology. By utilising laser-cooled atoms confined in optical lattices, researchers ...

As if timekeeping in the U.S. wasn’t already pretty accurate, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) just declared a new atomic clock, the NIST-F2, to ...

Physicists at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics have developed a new atomic clock that is so accurate, it will not lose a second of time in more than 200 million years. That makes the ...

Improvements in clocks are setting the stage for a redefinition of the second. This is an Inside Science story. (Inside Science) -- Earlier this year, in a nondescript lab at the National Institute of ...

Atomic clocks have long been the gold standard for measuring time and frequency. Among them, optical clocks—using atoms like strontium or aluminum—have reached staggering levels of accuracy, with ...

The next generation of atomic clocks “ticks” at the frequency of a laser. That is around 100,000 times faster than the microwave frequencies of the caesium clocks that currently generate the second.