The 2026 Doomsday Clock is ticking closer to midnight, signaling humanity edging to the "closest it has ever been to catastrophe" according to the Atomic Scientists, and the human race destroying ...

USA TODAY asked Alexandra Bell, the president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a few questions about the ...

Most clocks, from wristwatches to the systems that run GPS and the internet, work by tracking regular, repeating motions. To build a clock, you need something that ticks in a perfectly repeatable way.

To find out how clock accuracy is verified and which reference is used for comparison, we visited the Belarusian State Institute of Metrology (BelGIM), where most of the national standards are kept.

Atomic clocks have been around for nearly 80 years, but their successors—nuclear clocks—are ready to take the stage. Two independent studies, both uploaded as preprints, report reliable timekeeping ...

For the first time, scientists used an atomic nucleus as a clock. The world’s most precise timepieces are made using atoms, specifically their electrons. But clocks based on atomic nuclei — protons ...

For many years, cesium atomic clocks have been reliably keeping time around the world. But the future belongs to even more accurate clocks: optical atomic clocks. In a few years' time, they could ...

For decades, scientists have tried to build a device even more precise than an atomic clock, which keeps time using electrons, the negatively charged particles that whiz around in an atom. Now, two ...

Smaller version Illustration of a conventional atomic fountain clock (left) next to NPL’s miniature atomic fountain clock. (Courtesy: NPL) A miniature version of an atomic fountain clock has been ...