Mixup & Time
Two couples in California discovered they were raising each other’s genetic children. Also, 20 atomic clocks are barely keeping up.
Featured Articles
An I.V.F. Mixup, a Shocking Discovery and an Unbearable Choice
New York Times • 25 Nov 2024 • ~7350 words • Archive Link
Two couples in California discovered they were raising each other’s genetic children. Should they switch their girls?
The other couple did not have the prolonged process of waiting and discovery that Daphna and Alexander had. Instead, there was an urgent phone call from the clinic, their fertility doctor weeping as he explained that there had been a terrible mistake: They had been raising the genetic child of another couple, who had been raising theirs. The conversation was a shock that plunged them into grief, even if Zoë’s mother, Annie, wasn’t entirely surprised. On some level, she had been waiting for a phone call like that one.
The mind-bending new science of measuring time
Financial Times • 25 Nov 2024 • ~5600 words • Archive Link
In windowless labs in Colorado sit the 20 atomic clocks the world sets its watch by. They’re barely keeping up.
One of Nist’s main concerns is time. It measures and distributes it for the United States, second after second, always and endlessly. Underlying this seemingly mundane task is a complex administrative bureaucracy and a sophisticated scientific apparatus. The institute claims five Nobel Prizes, one in chemistry and four in physics. In recent years, the measurement science has outpaced the bureaucracy that constrains it, and both are now working to redefine the second itself.
Recommended Articles (6 Articles Today)
What Ever Happened to the Lady Jaguars?
New York Times • 24 Nov 2024 • ~5850 words • Archive Link
They were the Lady Jaguars, a winless basketball team of troubled teenage girls. The New York Times spent months with them in 2012 and 2013. Recently, we wondered: What happened to the girls? Had they risen from their circumstances and fulfilled their visions of a better life? We set out to find them.
As teens, they were fragile, awkward, wounded, resilient, optimistic. They were young enough to have dreams, modest ones, mostly of attaining something marginally better than what they were living. The last lines of my final article in the 2012 series had left their future open, untold. “A cold, late-winter wind blew, and the girls rushed to get into the warmth of awaiting cars, back into a life without a basketball team,” I wrote. “In a moment, it seemed, they were scattered like leaves, and it was impossible to know just where they would be blown.”
