Science

Atomic clocks record time using microwaves at a frequency matched to electron transitions in certain atoms. They are the basis upon which a second is defined. But there is a new kid on the block, the optical clock, which boasts even higher accuracy. Is it time to redefine the second? Optical clocks can reach accuracies at the level of 10-18 , “which is a number so accurate that if the clock started running at the big bang, by now it will have lost 1 second”, says Alexandra Tofful, an optical clock physicist at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London, which oversees scientific measurement standards in the UK. Unlike atomic clocks, this new type of timekeeper probes electron transitions with light. “Because visible l...

Archaeologist Kristina Douglass studies how past human adaptation can inform solutions to today’s climate challenges. She and her team work in southwest Madagascar’s Velondriake Marine Protected Area, investigating how communities have adapted to environmental variability over thousands of years. They study archaeological sites, analyze remote sensing data and conduct oral histories to reveal the ways in which Indigenous communities have managed their landscapes and resources sustainably. “It’s like being in a library of human experience and looking for the perfect book to deal with a question that has just come up today,” says Douglass, who is a Columbia Climate School professor and a research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “I really like to think of our wo...

Smartphones can be a distraction from other tasksPheelings media/Shutterstock Do you find yourself distracted at work, turning to your smartphone for a bit of mindless scrolling? One solution is to put your phone out of reach – but unfortunately, it seems this may not work. “People turn their phone upside down, hide it under a notebook, sometimes you see the slightly fatalistic ‘throw it over my shoulders behind me’,” says Maxi Heitmayer at the London School of Economics. He has previously studied phone use and found that people interact with their devices about every 5 minutes. To see if this distraction can be avoided, Heitmayer recorded 22 university students and office workers, aged between 22 and 31, working as usual on their laptops on a desk in a private ro...

Melting glaciers can have profound effects on nations all over the world—from mountain communities to small island states. At the U.N. headquarters in New York on Friday, March 21, U.N. General Assembly President Philémon Yang closed the proceedings of the inaugural World Glacier Day with a stark warning: “We cannot afford to wait, we must act before the ice disappears…before our glaciers all disappear.”  Alphabetically arranged flags outside the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Credit: Joseph Griffiths  The event was held in the Trusteeship Council Chamber, a space used from the 1940s through the 1990s to oversee the decolonization of territories under the administration of the U.N. The location was symbolic, since the chamber has long been associated with international coop...

Thunderstorms over Indonesia, seen from the International Space StationNASA Earth Observatory / International Space Station (ISS) An AI weather program running for a single second on a desktop can match the accuracy of traditional forecasts that take hours or days on powerful supercomputers, claim its creators. Weather forecasting has, since the 1950s, relied on physics-based models that extrapolate from observations made using satellites, balloons and weather stations. But these calculations, known as numerical weather prediction (NWP), are extremely intensive and rely on vast, expensive and energy-hungry supercomputers. In recent years, researchers have tried to streamline this process by applying AI. Google scientists last year created an AI tool that could rep...