A team of physicists has discovered a surprisingly simple way to build nuclear clocks using tiny amounts of rare thorium. By ...

Atomic clocks have long been the gold standard for measuring time and frequency. Among them, optical clocks—using atoms like strontium or aluminum—have reached staggering levels of accuracy, with ...

Last year, a UCLA-led team accomplished something scientists have been trying to do for 50 years. They made radioactive thorium nuclei absorb and emit photons like electrons in an atom do. This ...

For all our telescopes and colliders, dark matter has remained an elusive ghost for the better part of a century. It outweighs everything we see by a factor of five, yet it slips past every detector ...

Researchers are looking for new ways to improve timekeeping because even small gains in stability can help physicists discover subtle physical effects. The thorium-229 nuclear clock is a newer venture ...

On January 27th, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will reveal the 2026 Doomsday Clock time. The announcement will occur ...

Scientists have used laser-excited thorium-229 to probe for ultralight dark matter, even without a fully built nuclear clock. Thorium-229’s unique nuclear transition offers up to a billion times more ...