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Submission + - First Nuclear Clocks Start Ticking in Vienna and Beijing (phys.org)

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Two groups, one in Vienna and one in Beijing, have successfully demonstrated the world's first nuclear clocks. Standard atomic clocks, like the caesium clocks that define the second, operate by observing the transition of electrons between different orbits about the nucleus. The resulting radiation is usually in the microwave range, and can produce clocks accurate to one second in 100 billion years.

Nuclear clocks go a step further, and probe energy transitions within the nucleus itself. Nuclei can arrange their protons and neutrons into different configurations, called isomers. The isomer with the lowest energy is the one usually found; higher-energy ones are only metastable and decay quickly. Usually it takes serious energy — x-rays and gamma rays — to excite a nucleus into a higher-energy arrangement. It so happens that thorium-229 can be excited using UV light with a wavelength of 148 nm — just within the capabilities of some exotic lasers.

It's still been quite a challenge. For one thing, Th-229 is not found in nature; it must be extracted from the decay chain of uranium-235. The Beijing team used just a microgram mixed in a crystal of calcium fluoride.

Although these prototype nuclear clocks are not yet more accurate than existing atomic clocks (one second in millions, rather than billions, of years), they show the way towards what may be possible. Because the energy transition is in the nucleus, rather than the electron cloud, it is less susceptible to outside disturbances like magnetic fields. And the fundamental frequency is much higher (five orders of magnitude), which should yield more precise timing. This development could lead to smaller and more reliable time standards across the world (and solar system).

Comment Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead (Score 2) 45

by dargaud (#66366394) Attached to: Francis Halzen Wins Nobel Physics Prize For Antarctic 'Ghost Particle' Hunt
You seem very angry... A nobel prize in penguin country should make any self-respecting Linux nerd happy !
Anyway, this observatory doesn't just prove that neutrino exist, we already knew that as you mention, but it is also highly directional and can build a map of sources. The JWST is very noce, yes, but it only take *better* pictures than previously. This allows for an entirely new view on the universe, in the same groundbreaking way as the gravity wave detectors. A few years ago everything we knew about the universe was from photons: radio, optics, then UV, IR, gamma, etc... but still electromagnetic. Then we build (I built !!!) cosmic ray detectors. And now neutrinos and a few others. It's great.

Comment Re:Hate to be that TV snob guy (Score 1) 34

by sg_oneill (#66366040) Attached to: Cable Lobby To Sue Trump FCC Over Repeal of National TV Ownership Cap

Well except half the streaming services are rotten with ads these days.

Its exceptionally painful in election season too. Just ugh.

Nornally I can nuke most of it via ad-blockers, But that stupid 70" samsung TV, no such luck.

(Hey, hackers, how about jailbreaking these things. Be nice to have an alternative to loungeroom spyware again)

Comment Re: Meanwhile, back at the benchmarks (Score 4, Informative) 25

A lawyer friend of mine uses a little fleet of small Qwens for paperwork and general office bureaucracy (He's not prepared to let them anywhere near actual lawyering for obvious reasons*) in his one man practice, and they work shockingly well. And I'm not being colorful when I say "bureaucracy" , these things are *really* bureaucratic. They've internally come up with procedures for everything including procedures for coming up with procedures. They run off a 512gb M4 mac studio and can be a little slow, but it means he gets to run it all offline airgapping them away from doing something stupid that might expose his clients data to the internet.

*He did experiment with using them to create mock trials to battletest legal arguments, and the result WAS impressive, but not impressive enough to use as part of regular legal practice and its still ia use that could anger the gods should they screw up and cite a fake case or something, so that was more for experimental purpose, though he's convinced it'd be a pretty lethal way of filtering out bad legal arguments if he monte-carloed the mock trials to figure out what sort of arguments a prosecutor could use against his own arguments.

Submission + - Wisconsin U–Madison Prof Francis Halzen named 2026 Nobel laureate in physi (wisc.edu)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Halzen is the principal investigator of the NSF IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the world’s largest — and perhaps strangest — telescope. The U.S. National Science Foundation-funded observatory is operated by an international collaboration of scientists led by the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center based at UW–Madison.

Embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, IceCube uses thousands of light sensors to survey the universe for neutrinos, nearly massless particles that rarely interact with other matter. Neutrinos provide information about the workings of black holes, galaxies and other objects in the cosmos.

“IceCube is like no other telescope in the world,” says UW–Madison interim Chancellor Eric M. Wilcots. “And there is no other scientist quite like Francis Halzen, whose idea to create a neutrino detector under almost a mile of ice has led to a remarkable multinational and multi-institutional scientific collaboration and a fundamental shift in how we think about the universe.”

Comment Re:Rural populations mostly vote red (Republican) (Score 1) 62

by sg_oneill (#66364840) Attached to: Rural Data Centers Are in for a Big Federal Tax Break

The problem conservatism has, and has always had, was that its always been primarily defined by "we oppose the new thing!" sentiments. That might be fine when "the new thing" is actively obnoxious, and neither leftism nor liberalism certainly isn't without some deep flaws, but it doesn't leave itself with a solid set of coherent first principles to build on.

Hence why you get paleoconservatives, who want religious control over life and a heavy government control over culture (aka speech) as well as supporting raising taxes in the form of tariffs and in bed with right-libertarians who want government control over economics to be dismantled and for the govt to get out of peoples lives, despite the fact they agree on *very* little except "liberals bad".

Comment Re:You need this for an emergency (Score 1) 199

by c (#66363648) Attached to: Radio Broadcasters Support America's 'AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act'

Younger generations gave up on radio because it sucks.

I'm gen X, and I despise radio so much that every time I've ever replaced a head unit, I've left the antenna disconnected. If radio was just music I could probably tolerate it, but I can't handle the ads and pretend DJ's.

For emergency purposes there are portable wind up radios in the emergency kits. Completely unused, in original packaging, because where I live the closest thing we have to natural disasters is winter storms that shut down the roads.

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