The Defusable Alarm Clock Will Start Your Day With A Bang [Video]

Imagine waking up with a bomb beside your bed. You have 10-seconds to cut one of four wires if you want to stop the countdown timer. This sounds like a nightmare, but it's not. It's just the defusable clock.

Mike Krumpus of Nootropic Design is the mastermind behind the clock and he packed plenty of detail into the Arduino-controlled device. The clock has a big red button that'll launch a countdown timer. Once initiated, you have 10 seconds to turn off the timer by snipping one of four wires. You have to pick the correct wire as only one will turn off the timer. Two of the other wires have no effect and one will fake detonate it.

To add a little challenge, the function of each wire changes every day so you never know which wire is the correct one. And the wires are replaceable so you can put fresh ones in each night and enjoy the clock every morning.

The electronics powering this clock will be available soon as kit from Krumpus. While you wait, you can sketch out your ideal bomb clock design. Once you get the kit and have everything assembled, fire off a photo of your creation so Krumpus can add it to his upcoming photo gallery. [Nootropic Design via Make]

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The World's Most Accurate Clock. Ever. [Monster Machines]

138 Million years. That's how long it's been since dinosaurs first appeared on Earth. And how long it'll take for this clock to lose a second.

The clock, dubbed the NPL-CsF2 (sexy, right?), is one of an elite class of cesium fountain clocks that's used by Europe, the US, and Japan as the primary frequency standard. This standard is used to obtain an International Atomic Time and Universal Coordinated Time—-both of which are employed in the communications and finance industries as well as for satellite navigation.

It stands just over eight feet tall and tosses cesium-33 atoms through a tunable microwave cavity and measures the number of oscillations as the cesium atoms transition between two energy levels—9,192,631,770 cycles being one second, according to the International System of Units. The external cylinder protects the fountain mechanism from external magnetic fields.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US operates the NIST-F1 cesium fountain, the previous record holder—it only loses a second once every hundred million years or so. As Io9 points out, this loss is due to the fact that "over time, background photons will cause the energy levels in the aluminum ions to shift around a bit, which makes the frequency shift around a bit. Since physicists can't adjust for that variance, they can't maintain the accuracy of the clock."

For the cesium fountain, NPL scientists took into account all phenomena known to shift the clock's frequency—from external elecromagnetic fields and atomic collisions, to the Doppler effect and microwave-lensing—that might affect clock's function. This attention to detail is what Krzysztof Szymaniec, the leader of the project, credits for the clock's extreme accuracy.

[CNET - BBC - National Physics Lab - Science Codex - Paleontology]

Monster Machines is all about the most exceptional machines in the world, from massive gadgets of destruction to tiny machines of precision, and everything in between.

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This Clock Won't Be Late for Another Ten Million Years, Give or Take [Time]

That hunk of metal to the right is the world's most accurate clock, say people with more knowledge of time and atomic clocks than anyone else.

Called a cesium fountain clock (aka atomic clock), this British ticker is accurate to within two 10 million billionths of a second and won't lose a second for the next ten million years or more. I hope someone is around to wind it at that time, otherwise things could get awkward when our bioconstruct kin are zipping around with their FTL drives and arrive in Alpha Centauri a full second late.

Back on Earth, on our side of the pond, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, which last reported an accuracy/uncertainty of 3 x 10-16. That's about 100 million years between losing or gaining a second to the layman. I'll take one for my wrist, please. [CNET]

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