Clock

Alarm clocks are a necessary technological evil for most of us, but the snooze button is an all too easy fallback for those unable to resist just a bit longer out under the covers. The singNshock is a concept that provides a slightly shocking answer to this problem.  Read More

There is something special about everyday items that manage to bridge the gap between art and practicality. Even after the owners of such pieces get used to the visual appeal, they're still left with something useful. Would-be objets d'art like the Cloud House and the Eliminator table lamp fall into this category, and now we have a clock to add to the mix. A Clock Clock, in fact.  Read More

As someone of a certain age, as a young child I was taught how to read the time using an analogue dial on a clock or watch. I suspect things are a little different now, with kids more used to digital displays on computers and smartphones. But I have some not-so-fond memories of trying to grasp the concept of the minute and second hands on an analogue display. How different my childhood could have been had someone, somewhere designed a watch with one hand rather than two.  Read More

Tourists looking for a unique hotel experience in Belgium may want to seek out the Hotel Gent, a new project from Tazu Rous. As part of an art experience planned for the city, the Japanese artist designed and constructed a fully-furnished hotel room around the historic Ghent Sint-Pieters train station. But this isn't just an old building that's been renovated into a hotel. Hotel Gent has only one room, and guests will be sharing it with the giant clock at the top of the station's tower.  Read More

If you’re a fan of things retro and an electronics do-it-youselfer, this might might be just the thing for you – it’s a kit that lets you built your own clock, that displays the time using wonderfully outdated nixie tubes.  Read More

The NIST-F1 atomic clock that currently serves as primary time and frequency standard for the U.S. is expected to neither gain nor lose a second in more than 100 million years. That might sound pretty accurate, but a proposed nuclear clock could make it look like a cheap digital wristwatch. It is claimed that the proposed clock would neither gain nor lose 1/20th of a second in 14 billion years. To put that in context, that’s the estimated age of the universe.  Read More

When is a clock not a clock? When it's a big fat reprogrammable five-character 18-segment display, a bit like the Alpha Clock Five from Evil Mad Science. Its 2.3 inch 18-segment alphanumeric characters are each illuminated by 54 LEDs, providing a bold, bright answer to that most burning of questions: what's the time?  Read More

When we hear about things being built to last, we usually think in terms of years or decades ... or maybe, centuries. But millennia? Well yes, if you’re talking about the 10,000 Year Clock. As its name implies, the 200 foot (61 meter)-tall timepiece is intended to run for 10,000 years, in a remote cave in West Texas. The clock’s “century hand” will advance one space every 100 years, although individuals who make the trek to the cave will be able to hear it chime once a day. The whole project is designed to get people thinking in the long term.  Read More

Atomic clocks are one of those things that most of us have probably always thought of as being big, ultra-expensive, and therefore only obtainable by well-funded research institutes. While that may have been the case at one time, a team of researchers have recently developed an atomic clock that they say is one one-hundredth the size – and that uses one one-hundredth the power – of previous commercially-available products. It’s called the Chip Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC), and it can be yours for about US$1,500 ... a little more than what you might pay for a regular clock, but not bad for one that varies by less than a millionth of a second per day.  Read More