Six Different Aging Clocks Agree: This AI-Designed Drug Turns Back Biological Age - ScienceAlert

Scientists have reached a major milestone in the quest to build an entirely new kind of clock. After decades of research, a team in Vienna has developed the world's first self-stabilizing nuclear clock, a device that could eventually measure time with far greater precision than today's most advanced atomic clocks. Unlike earlier prototypes, the new nuclear clock can maintain its own stability without depending on a conventional atomic clock. Researchers have demonstrated that it can operate steadily for more than 24 hours without intervention.

Timekeeping has officially entered its nuclear age. Two independent teams, one in Vienna, Austria and another in Beijing, China have built working thorium-229 nuclear clock prototypes. Rather than track changes in an atom’s electrons the way that current atomic clocks do, these nuclear versions use a laser that’s tuned to the frequency where a thorium nucleus flips between two energy states for potentially even more accurate time keeping. Scientists believe this new approach could one day make the clocks far more reliable than any existing atomic timekeeper. To put that in perspective, current atomic clocks can  keep time with an uncertainty of 1 second every 300 million years. Scientists predict that more advanced nuclear clocks could move that metric into the billions of years. That could open the door to probing some of the universe’s hardest-to-measure phenomena, like notoriously elusive dark matter. The Chinese clock and Austrian clock were detailed in a pair of studies published this week in the journal Nature.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.

Forests that stood on Mozambique's coast thousands of years ago now lie beneath shallow seas, and they have become fish-filled "peat reefs" with marine life comparable to coral reefs, researchers report in Scientific Reports. A team from the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies (BCSS) Ocean Observatory, led by Mario Lebrato, documented the submerged peat in the Bazaruto Archipelago in the Western Indian Ocean. BCSS, founded in 2017, describes itself as Africa's first permanent ocean observatory. Working with universities and institutions in the U. K., U. S. and Canada, the team believes it has carried out the first ecological study of peat reefs anywhere in the tropics. Old forests, new seafloorRadiocarbon dating shows the peat formed between about 300 and 5,000 years ago, and chemical analysis indicates it came mostly from coastal land plants and trees. Some samples contain up to 40% organic carbon by dry weight. Lebrato said the coastline has very little natural hard seabed, mostly shifting sand. As rising seas expose the old peat layers, they create rare solid habitat where marine life can settle, hide and feed.