NIST traced the problem to its Boulder, Colorado campus, where a prolonged utility power outage disrupted operations. The ...

A destructive windstorm disrupted the power supply to more than a dozen atomic clocks that keep official time in the United ...

For decades, atomic clocks have provided the most stable means of timekeeping. They measure time by oscillating in step with ...

Atomic clocks may be headed into cell phones, thanks to a breakthrough by federal researchers. Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have demonstrated the heart of an atomic ...

“The death of the astronomical second and the birth of atomic time” is how the British physicist Louis Essen described 3 June 1955, when the world’s first practical atomic clock ticked for the first ...

If you want to mark the passage of time, you need something to occur with regularity, repeatedly, that you can use as your measure of keeping time. Throughout history, we've really had two options for ...

A newly-designed atomic clock uses entangled atoms to keep time even more precisely than its state-of-the-art counterparts. The design could help scientists detect dark matter and study gravity's ...

Markus Kuhn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

Eager to say goodbye to the worst economic year since the Great Depression? You'll have to wait a second. That's because the custodians of time are preparing to tack a "leap second" onto the clock on ...

On June 30, the world will receive a gift of time: a single, extra second known as a “leap second.” At that moment, the official atomic clocks that keep Universal Coordinated Time will mark the time ...