Spotlight
The best clocks in the world count the oscillations of electrons. A nucleus would make a steadier pendulum, far better shielded from the stray fields that nudge electrons, but nuclear transitions normally sit far beyond the reach of any laser. Thorium-229 is the single known exception, with a transition low enough for laser light to drive. Since 2024 that has been done with pulsed lasers, whose broad spectrum puts only a sliver of the light on resonance, and whose readout means waiting for the nucleus to glow back, a decay that takes around ten minutes.
A study in Nature from Thorsten Schumm's group at the TU Wien Atominstitut, with the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, PTB, removes the wait. The team, led by Ira Morawetz, Thomas Riebner and Luca Toscani De Col, built a continuous-wave laser at 148 nm by tripling the frequency of an infrared diode laser twice, reaching a linewidth of around 10 kHz or below. Instead of watching for fluorescence, they measured absorption directly, the light the thorium nuclei in a calcium fluoride crystal take out of the beam. Each detection cycle becomes a hundred times shorter.
For a clock, that speed is the point. A clock can only correct itself as fast as it can read itself, and a ten-minute readout was a structural brake on the whole idea. The authors set out a path towards stability that would make a solid-state nuclear clock a serious instrument, including for testing whether fundamental constants drift over time.
The spectra also show something new about the crystal: thorium sits in two distinct sites, one of them almost perfectly symmetric, a quieter home for the transition. Why its line is still broader than expected, the authors cannot yet say.
Radar Scans
Funding Moves
Four new FWF projects at Vienna institutions, each worth EUR 450,000, approved on 8 September and awaiting their start: Nicole Amberg ( Medical University of Vienna, how the brainstem develops), Hannes Vietzen ( Medical University of Vienna, Epstein-Barr virus and B cells in multiple sclerosis), Markus Faulhuber ( University of Vienna, optimal sampling on lattices), and Anaïs Angelo ( Austrian Academy of Sciences, what "decolonisation" has meant across Europe and Africa).
WWTF Insight
This fortnight's Crossref data brought forward a paper from Marisa Hoeschele's group at the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, credited to LS23-014 (ANIML), the WWTF project asking whether budgerigars have something like a language of their own. Led by Felix Haiduk with Daniel L. Bowling, the team put birds and people through the same three-choice test of rhythm. Female budgerigars, but not males, went for rhythmic sound, and a steady beat or a repeated pattern drew them equally. Humans went for the beat, and leaned towards the two combined. The authors trace the gap to what each species uses rhythm for: courtship warble in the birds, group chorusing in us. Shared ability, different jobs. For a project built to compare how budgerigars and humans communicate, that is a useful place to find the first fork.
Stray Signal
No rumble in the jungle
An elephant that wants a rival gone does not have to charge. Vesta Eleuteri and Angela Stoeger-Horwath at the University of Vienna, with colleagues, watched wild elephants squabbling in two South African parks and catalogued 41 gesture types, used for two main requests: "move away" and "stop that". The signals were intentional, aimed at a particular elephant to get a particular result, a kind of communication so far mapped mostly in apes. The two populations shared much of the repertoire, but not the grievance. In Addo, they fought over water. In Marakele, over reeds. With a flick of the trunk or a spread of the ears. And since we are talking about savannah elephants, it was, strictly speaking, not a jungle either.
The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has named Ingeborg Hochmair-Desoyer and Erwin Hochmair among the five recipients of the 2026 Richard N. Merkin Prize in Biomedical Technology, alongside Graeme Clark, Michael Merzenich and Blake Wilson. Their work on a multichannel cochlear implant began at the TU Wien in 1975, and the first device went into a patient in Vienna in December 1977. The principle is simple to state: each pitch goes to its own place in the inner ear. More than a million people hear that way today.