Clocks on Earth are ticking a bit more regularly thanks to NIST-F4, a new atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) campus in Boulder, Colorado. This month, NIST researchers published a journal article establishing NIST-F4 as one of the world’s most accurate timekeepers. NIST has also submitted the clock for acceptance as a primary frequency standard by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), the body that oversees the world’s time. NIST-F4 measures an unchanging…

World’s first private nuclear reactor, ‘the atomic furnace’ pioneered advancements in agriculture, chemistry, and medicine while employing an innovative safety design The Armour Research Foundation Reactor at Illinois Institute of Technology (Illinois Tech) has been officially recognized as a Nuclear Historic Landmark by the American Nuclear Society (ANS), joining an elite group of fewer than 100 sites across the United States to receive this designation. Nicknamed “the atomic furnace,” the world’s first privately owned and operated nuclear reactor marked a significant transition in the…

Findings identify opportunities for new treatments of Parkinson’s and related neurodegenerative disorders A longstanding mystery in Parkinson’s disease research has been why some individuals carrying pathogenic variants that increase their risk of PD go on to develop the disease, while others who also carry such variants do not. The prevailing theory has suggested additional genetic factors may play a role. To address this question, a new study from Northwestern Medicine used modern technology, called CRISPR interference, to systematically examine every…

Mayor improvement for particle research at CERN Scientists working together in the “Antihydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy” (AEgIS) and other experiments at CERN’s Antimatter Factory, such ALPHA and GBAR, are on a mission to measure the free-fall of antihydrogen under Earth’s gravity with high precision, each using a different technique. AEgIS’s approach involves producing a horizontal beam of antihydrogen and measuring its vertical displacement using a device called a moiré deflectometer that reveals tiny deviations in motion and a detector…