Lizzie Gibney

And you might have seen previous studies where they found that when people actually know someone who's from a minority religion, a trans person, any kind of minority that can face prejudice, they're much more likely to have positive views towards them just if they know them, if they have people in their lives from those groups.

And this shows that that can happen with a celebrity.

It can be a parasocial, one-sided effect.

You don't actually have to personally know them.

They just have to be this kind of positive role model.

So

Yeah, maybe it's something we can bear in mind when trying to foster more tolerance in society.

So this is a story that I wrote about in Nature, and it's from two preprints from a group in Europe and one in China.

And it's a completely new kind of clock.

So we might need a little clock 101.

So the most precise clocks that we have at the moment, like all clocks need some natural way of ticking, like our swing, like a pendulum.

For an optical atomic clock, which is the most precise we have today, that tick is a bit abstract.

It comes from the oscillations of the light wave that would bump an electron up in energy level around an atom.

So electrons live in these orbits at different energy levels.

You've got to tune a laser to be at exactly the right energy to trigger this jump between those levels.

And you lock your laser to this natural timekeeper and then use that laser's frequency, its oscillations, in order to keep time, just like a pendulum.

Exactly.

And we use this really precise time for all kinds of things, for GPS to work, to synchronise mobile phone networks, computing systems.

It's really, really important, even if we don't always notice it across society.

So at the moment, we have these optical atomic clocks.