Time

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

In factories where products are mass-produced, it's extremely important to know how long the human workers take to perform certain tasks. This not only allows the pace of the assembly line to be set, but it also allows factory owners to identify time-wasting problems such as superfluous movements, overly frequent tool changes, or impractically-located components. Typically, workers are periodically timed by a stopwatch-wielding supervisor, or using a timer that they start and stop themselves. A new wearable time-keeping system, however, promises more accurate readings.  Read More

Last year researchers at Imperial College London proposed that along with being used to cloak physical objects metamaterials could also be used to cloak a singular event in time. A year later, researchers from Cornell University have demonstrated a working "temporal cloak" that is able to conceal a burst of light as if it had never occurred.  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

For the past couple of years, people wishing to create ultra-high-resolution panoramic photographs have been able to do so, using their own digital camera and a GigaPan robotic tripod. The device slowly pans the camera back and forth across a user-determined vista, triggering it to take up to several hundred shots in the process. The included software then stitches all the photos together – side-to-side and top-to-bottom – creating one big panorama, which retains its resolution even when details are zoomed in on, much like Google Earth. So, what could top that? Time-lapse videos created using GigaPan Time Machine software, as it turns out.  Read More

Is reality a 3D hologram of a 2D universe? A team of researchers at the US Department of Energy's Fermilab are trying to take a measurement of the fabric of spacetime to show that there is a finite unit that makes up the universe. To do so, they have created the world's most accurate clock, the holographic interferometer or holometer.  Read More

TokyoFlash, the maker of creative LED watches such as the "Broke" stained glass watch, the Retsu and the Round Trip Pocket Watch, is at it again. Always on the lookout for wacky new ways to display the time with LEDs, the company has just released the "Traffic" watch.  Read More

Known to Gizmag readers for its outlandish timepieces, Swiss watchmaker URWERK's latest offering – the UR-CC1 Black Cobra – definitely falls into the “cool watch” category. Made from titanium and gold treated with aluminum titane nitride to achieve the black coloration, the Cobra shows the time via two linearly-progressing bars that indicate the hour and minute, and a dual clockwork/numeric seconds display.  Read More