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Physicists Just Built the First-Ever Nuclear Clock

The best timekeepers today—atomic clocks—work off the quantum vibrations of an atom, specifically its electrons. But physicists have long dreamt of even better clocks that run on atomic nuclei, which are less sensitive to environmental disturbances. According to new research, that dream might soon become reality.
Last week, two independent teams based in Europe and China reported the first set of results from experiments using an atomic nuclei clock based on crystals of calcium fluoride containing thorium-229. Both papers, which have yet to be peer reviewed, are available as a preprint on arXiv. In the European experiment, researchers compared how well the clock fared against leading atomic clocks involved in the search for dark matter. The Chinese team, on the other hand, demonstrated the clock’s operation to compare its performance with atomic clocks.
“These results establish a solid-state platform for compact nuclear clocks, nuclear quantum sensing, and precision tests of fundamental physics,” the European team wrote in its paper.
Advanced timekeeping
According to a column by physicists Eric Hudson and Andrei Derevianko, ultraprecise clocks are “more than scientific curiosities,” as they are vital for smooth navigation, communications, and international timekeeping. Hudson and Derevianko, from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Nevada, Reno, respectively, contributed to research from last December that demonstrated the potential of thorium-229 in atomic nucleus clocks.
In atomic clocks, scientists zap and excite the electrons in an atom to push the electrons from one energy level to another. That absorption “happens at an exquisitely precise frequency,” they explained, adding that these patterns are “set by the laws of physics” and give the world a fairly consistent standard for keeping time.
Meanwhile, a nucleus is 10,000 times smaller than an atom and less prone to disturbances from temperature, electric fields, and other environmental disturbances, the pair wrote—hence, physicists’ long-time interest in atomic nucleus clocks.
A concept comes to life
The challenge, then, was to find an atom that scientists could most effectively manipulate. For instance, it should be responsive to the laser that scientists use to trigger the “ticks,” so to speak, to tell time. In that sense, thorium-229 was an “exceptionally rare case” in which it has two different states, which scientists can induce using lasers to excite the nucleus from one state to another, explained Hudson and Derevianko.
The latest pair of papers build upon their work, among many others from the past couple decades. Importantly, the recent demonstrations implement a feedback loop that stabilizes the clock’s operations. This represents an improvement from the European team’s own work from 2024 and 2025.
“This was the final missing step before calling it an actual clock,” Lars von der Wense, a physicist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, told Science News. With forthcoming improvements to laser and crystal technology, nuclear clocks should advance rapidly, added von der Wense, who wasn’t involved in either work.
At the frontier of physics
Setting aside nuclear clocks’ practical benefits, researchers believe they could test the fundamental constraints of nature and new physics, according to Hudson and Derevianko. And indeed, that’s what the European team immediately set out to do with its latest iteration of a nuclear clock. The latter half of its paper describes how well the clock fared in evaluating constraints for ultralight dark matter—a hypothetical form of matter that could explain a whole bunch of cosmic mysteries.
To Science News, Thorsten Schumm, a physicist at TU Wien in Austria from the European team, reported that the nuclear clock already outperformed all atomic clocks in certain types of measurements. All that said, the technology is still at its first stages, he added. But it looks like nuclear clocks are off to a good start.

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Number of arrests after riots in Northern Ireland rises to 19

Police said 19 people, including a 16-year-old boy, had now been arrested after two nights of rioting in Northern Ireland following a knife attack earlier in the week.
The violence broke out after far-right activists called for demonstrations in response to the attack, which was captured in a graphic video.
Masked men burned vehicles and houses and blocked roads hours after Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson and other agitators encouraged people to take to the streets on Tuesday. On Wednesday, police used plastic bullets and water cannon after crowds attacked police with rocks and petrol bombs.
Concerns have been raised about messages encouraging disorder being spread online and forwarded over messaging apps. A committee of MPs on Friday warned that the government had failed to tackle the spread of misinformation online.
Chi Onwurah, the chair of the science, innovation and technology committee, said: “Unrest in Belfast shows that the government hasn’t done enough to tackle the scale and speed of the algorithmic amplification of misinformation online.”
In a letter to the technology secretary, Liz Kendall, Onwurah accused the government of ignoring the committee’s warning that social media algorithms had driven previous violent unrest in Southport by amplifying harmful and misleading content.
Onwurah said: “My committee warned in a report last year that the Online Safety Act was inadequate and riddled with regulatory gaps.”
The letter said: “The government and Ofcom should now force social media companies to take steps during crises to tackle the viral algorithmic amplification of not just illegal content, but also content that may help to drive unrest – such as by spreading false information about an incident – without meeting the bar for illegality.”
The Police Service for Northern Ireland (PSNI) said Thursday night was “much calmer” with only “lower-level disturbances” compared with the disorder of the previous two nights, and along with Police Scotland appealed for calm before anti-racist demonstrations planned in Belfast and Glasgow.
The PSNI assistant chief constable Ryan Henderson said: “Thankfully, the situation was much calmer than we have seen in recent days. Our policing operation will remain over the weekend to ensure public order is maintained.”
The victim of the knife attack, Stephen Ogilvie, who suffered deep cuts and lost an eye, remained in an induced coma on Friday but his condition was said to be improving. A Sudanese national, Hadi Alodid, 30, appeared in court on Wednesday charged with attempted murder over the attack.
A number of anti-racism events have been organised in response to this week’s unrest. A gathering billed as a community solidarity rally was due to take place in west Belfast on Friday evening, while a Together Against Hate demonstration is due to be held at Belfast City Hall on Saturday.
Police are also expecting large numbers to join a protest in Glasgow organised by Stand Up to Racism Scotland. The protest is in response to unrest in the city on Tuesday when five people including two police officers were injured, and Glasgow’s central mosque was forced to lock worshippers inside.
Police Scotland’s assistant chief constable Alan Waddell said there would be a large police presence at the demonstration. He said: “There must be no repeat of the disorder and violence seen in the city earlier this week, when members of our communities were targeted because of the colour of their skin and officers working to keep people safe were injured.
“My message is clear. Those attending must do so lawfully and the police will support public safety.”
The lawyer Aamer Anwar was among those supporting Saturday’s demonstration. He said: “Saturday is about reclaiming our streets, not a day for hate, but a celebration of our city and many cultures. Those who wish to cause the mayhem are not welcome.”

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SpaceX soars 23% in Wall Street debut and makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire

NEW YORK (AP) — SpaceX shares shot 23% higher as the rocket maker’s shares soared in their debut on Wall Street and made CEO Elon Musk the first-ever trillionaire.
The shares opened at $150 and kept rising, reaching $166.90 around 12:.20 p.m. ET. That price gave the company a market value of $2.18 trillion. Forbes is now estimating Musk’s net worth at $1.1 trillion.
Institutional and retail investors jumped at the opportunity to buy 555.6 million shares of SpaceX at the offering price of $135 apiece. The $75 billion in proceeds easily topped the previous record IPO from oil giant Saudi Aramco in 2019.
Musk says SpaceX is going public now because it needs money to fund its ambitions of putting satellites and data centers in space and eventually establishing a colony of people on Mars.
Musk earlier marked the opening of trading on Nasdaq, where the company’s are trading under the symbol “SPCX,” by joining a ceremonial bell ringing from Starbase, the South Texas home of SpaceX.
He reiterated his lofty goals “to make life multi-planetary.”
“Not just a few astronauts, I mean literally you,” Musk said. “Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars and ultimately beyond.”
Known for his brilliant technology breakthroughs, as well as wild claims and missed deadlines, Musk is expected to break that trillion dollar mark in the biggest initial public offering ever as investors place bets on a company with losses as big as its ambitions. Ahead of the first trade in SpaceX, Forbes puts Musk’s net worth at $982.6 billion.
In addition to establishing a one-million person Martian colony, the company has promised to save humanity by establishing other outposts in space, launch data centers the size of football fields into orbit and outdo rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to make money from artificial intelligence.
To reach its goals, SpaceX needs billions more than it currently takes in from its rocket and satellite business. Between the start of 2025 and March 31, 2026, the company lost $8.7 billion.
Wall Street bankers that helped take SpaceX public are enthusiastic about the company — and the big fees they will earn — but not everyone thinks the stock price is justified.
Analysts at research firm Morningstar, which doesn’t earn any investment banking fees, wrote that the IPO is “significantly overvalued” because of SpaceX’s unproven technology and massive capital needs.
They estimate the company is only worth $780 billion — less than half its IPO value.
Still, Musk has pulled off the seemingly impossible before.
The soon-to-be trillionaire — on paper at least — made his fortune by creating two companies, Zip2 and PayPal, that netted him about $200 million at sale. He used that money to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla, and defied the odds by creating a space company that figured out how to reuse rockets and a car company that made electric vehicles cool.
Musk has realized vast sums of wealth for himself, much of it in stock he has yet to cash in or grants for shares he’ll only receive if Tesla or SpaceX hit ambitious performance targets. His recent pay package from Tesla drew criticism from the Vatican. At Tesla, he’s worried shareholders by fighting with regulators or dividing his attention between multiple companies and last year by taking a role in the Trump administration.
But a rising stock price has cured all ills: Since it went public in 2010, Tesla has returned 20,000% for shareholders, or more than $1.2 trillion in investor wealth. That has helped lift Musk’s pre-SpaceX IPO worth to $795 billion, according to Forbes magazine.
SpaceX is the first of three “megacap” companies expected to go public this year, with Anthropic and OpenAI to follow. Nasdaq even revised its rules to allow SpaceX to gain entry into funds tied to its indexes in 15 days, which means investors will end up buying the rocket maker’s shares much earlier.
Not all investors are thrilled about SpaceX potentially showing up in their holdings of index funds. Officials from pension funds for firefighters, teachers and other workers in California and New York sent a letter to SpaceX last month decrying some of the provisions in its IPO, including the “super voting shares,” mandatory arbitration of shareholder claims instead of the possibility of lawsuits and how much power Musk will hold over the company.
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AP reporters Stan Choe and Wyatte Grantham-Philips contributed from New York.

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David Hockney: Celebrated British artist dies at 88

British painter David Hockney, whose vibrant portraits and sun-drenched depictions of the everyday made him one of contemporary art’s most beloved figures, has died at 88.
The artist died “peacefully at home” on Thursday, one month short of his 89th birthday, according to a statement provided to CNN by his longtime publicist Erica Bolton.
Born in Bradford, UK, in 1937, Hockney attended his local art school before studying at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London. Successful from the earliest stages of his career, he soon relocated to Los Angeles, where he would spend much of the 1960s and eventually settle.
While teaching at various US colleges, he established himself as a key figure in the Pop Art movement. Like many of his contemporaries, Hockney injected his work with bright colors and dancing lines. But while the likes of Andy Warhol (who was just nine years his senior) turned their focus to commercialism and consumer society, Hockney appeared more concerned with his immediate surroundings.
His deeply personal realist style was characterized by self-portraits, still lives and depictions of friends and lovers (and, later, his dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie, whom he immortalized in a series of paintings and an accompanying book). Having come out as gay in his early 20s — a time when homosexuality was still outlawed in England — he also explored sexuality through playfully explicit images and almost mundane snapshots of domestic life: men showering or quietly sitting together.
Among his best-known works from this period are a series of light-filled swimming pool paintings that seemed to freeze a moment in time. But his oeuvre was diverse, spanning photography, printmaking and stage design for ballet and opera productions. He went on to produce photocollages in the 1980s, and many of his later — and often more abstract — landscape paintings were also well received.
Hockney held onto much of his own work, and established an eponymous foundation to manage it. Those paintings that did go to market have soared in value in recent years.
In 2018, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” fetched $90.3 million to become (if only briefly) the most expensive work by a living artist ever to sell at auction. The next year, his double portrait “Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott” went for $49.5 million at Christie’s, while his 1980 landscape painting “Nichols Canyon” went on to fetch over $41 million.
Yet, Hockney never appeared especially interested in the commercial success of his work. Nor did he reap all the benefits — his record-breaking swimming pool painting was sold by his New York dealer for just $18,000 in 1972. And despite his achievements, he continued working throughout his later years. When CNN visited his California studio in 2017, a then-80-year-old Hockney said he still painted for six or seven hours every day.
“I’m perfectly happy doing this,” he said at the time. “I feel 30 when I’m in the studio, so I come in every day and work, because then I feel 30.”
By this time, Hockney, who was never afraid to experiment with technology, had begun creating art using an iPad. Spending much of the Covid-19 pandemic in Normandy, France, he produced a series of digital renderings of the surrounding countryside that were later printed and exhibited at London’s Royal Academy and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, among others.
With his mop of blond (then gray) hair, large glasses and, oftentimes, a cigarette in hand, Hockney was one of art’s most recognizable figures. During his lifetime he was the subject of several major retrospectives, including one in 2017 that traveled between Tate Britain, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A statement from Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson praised Hockney for being an “endlessly inventive artist,” who “taught us about the joy of looking, seeing things the rest of us failed to notice — his witty and sharp observations a constant presence in his work and in person.”
He was also among the UK’s most decorated artists, having been invited to join the Royal Academy and, among other honors, awarded the John Moores Painting Prize and the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for painting.
While he famously turned down a knighthood, he went on in 2012 to accept Queen Elizabeth II’s invitation to the Order of Merit, a group of celebrated public figures that is limited to no more than 24 members at any given time. (In true Hockney style, he turned up to one of the Order’s luncheons at Buckingham Palace in a pair of bright yellow Crocs — to the apparent delight of Elizabeth’s successor, King Charles III.)
In her statement announcing Hockney’s death, Bolton described him as “one of the most important figures in contemporary art in both the 20th and 21st centuries.” The publicist added that his “enduring legacy reflects his underlying enthusiasm for life, his outstanding sense of humor, his immense generosity and his investigative curiosity encapsulated by his signature phrase, ‘love life.’”

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The Great AI Token Price Crash Is Coming

I had lunch with the CEO of an AI infrastructure company recently. I can’t tell you their name, but they said something that really caught my attention: There will be a crop of new AI models later this year that will be a lot better and more efficient.
This will likely make AI tokens more abundant and radically cheaper. (Tokens are the basic units models use to process information, and the standard way AI use is measured and priced).
Hand-wringing about tokenmaxxing could die down. Or, users could go on another bender and burn even more tokens with abandon.
Either way, the price of tokens is probably about to plummet. This is why we already see some AI model providers slashing prices, and other players talking about doing so.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said AI costs had become a huge issue, adding that the startup will have “a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend.”
This trend may already be showing up in the data. A closely watched token spending index run by Silicon Data peaked at around 2.06 in late May and fell to 1.75 as of June 10.
Carmen Li, the CEO of Silicon Data, told me this could mean token prices are dropping across many AI models.
Blackwell finally emerges
The main force driving token prices lower is a new wave of technology that’s sweeping through AI data centers.
Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs are being installed in huge volumes right now. By the second half of this year, these systems, which are really supercomputers rather than chips, will be operating at scale, helping AI labs train new models and run them more efficiently.
These systems took a while to install properly, partly because they needed to be water-cooled and required other gnarly new data center setups. But the payoff could be huge.
50 x more, 35 x cheaper
SemiAnalysis, a respected AI research firm, compared Nvidia’s top Blackwell system, the GB 300 NVL72, to Nvidia’s previous system, called the Hopper HGX 200.
With the older system, each GPU generated 90 tokens per second, while the new Blackwell system generated 6,000. That’s 65 times more.
These systems consume massive amounts of electricity, and the newer Blackwell offerings use even more. So SemiAnalysis also looked at how many tokens each system generated per megawatt. On this measure, Hopper churned out 54,000 tokens per second, while Blackwell generated 2.8 million. 50 times more.
Electricity prices are rising, due to all these energy-sipping AI data centers. So these days, GPU systems are assessed based on how much it costs to generate one million tokens.
SemiAnalysis tested this, too, and found that the older Hopper system cost $4.20 for every million tokens. The Blackwell system cost 12 cents. That’s 35 times cheaper.
Again, new AI models will be increasingly trained and run on these new Blackwell systems as 2026 progresses. This is very likely to produce a massive increase in the number of cheaply-generated tokens.
This is why AI model providers will probably slash token prices: Because they can.

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US stocks drift as oil falls and Wall Street waits for SpaceX’s debut

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are drifting Friday after oil prices fell again and as Wall Street waits for the highly anticipated debut of SpaceX coming later in the day. It’s the first of three gargantuan companies in the artificial-intelligence industry expected to start selling their shares on the U.S. market, and it could show how hungry investors still are for AI stocks following vicious swings and big doubts for them over the last week.
The S&P 500 rose 0.1%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 270 points, or 0.5%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.1% lower.
Stocks got a lift from a 2.2% drop for the price of Brent crude oil to $88.36 per barrel, deepening its loss for the week. Oil prices have come down since President Donald Trump on Thursday called off his threat to launch strikes on Iran and said a potential deal with Iran may be imminent.
A deal to end the war could reopen the Strait of Hormuz and allow oil tankers to once again deliver crude from the Persian Gulf to customers worldwide. Its near closure since the war began has sent the price of Brent up from roughly $70 per barrel and caused a wave of painful inflation for the world.
Of course, financial markets have rallied in the past on hopes that an end to the war with Iran was near, only to get disappointed each time.
The bigger factor for Wall Street over the last week has actually been AI stocks, and how they have gone from roaring to records to suddenly turning lower. The concern is whether such stocks shot too high, too fast because of AI mania, and their careening moves have sometimes reversed direction by the hour.
Several headed back down the roller coaster Friday following Thursday’s climb. Micron Technology fell 2%, and Broadcom slipped 0.8%.
Some of the pressure on AI stocks may be coming from investors pulling their money out in hopes of moving it to SpaceX and other big AI-related initial public offerings.
SpaceX’s stock is set to begin trading on the Nasdaq later in the day for the first time. Elon Musk’s rocket company also has big investments in AI, part of the reason it has built up $29.1 billion in debt, as of the end of March. It’s unknown exactly what time SpaceX’s stock will begin trading.
If SpaceX shares hold at their offering price, the company’s market value would be $1.77 trillion. That would put it close to Broadcom and Meta Platforms, the sixth and seventh most valuable companies on Wall Street.
In the bond market, Treasury yields rose to regain some of their sharp slides the day before, when oil prices dropped following Trump’s announcement. The yield on the 10-year Treasury climbed to 4.48% from 4.45% late Thursday.
High yields can slow entire economies and undercut prices for all kinds of investments, including stocks and cryptocurrencies. They hit investments seen as the most expensive in particular, and some critics are calling the AI industry a bubble where investment inflated too far.
In stock markets abroad, indexes rallied as they caught up to Thursday’s big gains on Wall Street.
South Korea’s Kospi jumped 4.6% and trimmed its losses from earlier this month taken because of sell-offs for AI-related stocks. The Kospi has nearly doubled since the start of the year.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 rose 2.8%, and France’s CAC 40 climbed 1.8% for two of the world’s bigger moves.
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AP Business Writers Chan Ho-him and Matt Ott contributed to this report.

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