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 NPL has developed a miniaturised Atomic Fountain Clock that promises to make accurate timekeeping technology smaller.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...