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dgacmu

The actual journal article, since NYT didn't bother linking to it: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-11084-4

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There are 2 Nature articles, for the 2 independent teams who have built such nuclear clocks with thorium 229.

This is the other article, from the Chinese team:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-11122-1

While both teams have used fluorite crystals doped with Th229, which was the most obvious choice for the active medium, they have used different kinds of optical frequency multipliers in order to generate the ultraviolet light required to probe the thorium nuclei.

For now, the frequency multiplication method used by the Chinese team is superior, allowing a greater output power, which ensures a better signal-to-noise ratio.

The team from Austria intends to use a better frequency multiplier in the future, to increase their output power, and they are evaluating several methods, one of which is the 4-wave mixing in cadmium vapor, already demonstrated by the Chinese team.

It's unfortunately not a case of bothering but rather intent: Keep the user on the site even at cost of quality

Is there evidence that is the actual reasoning, because I find it ridiculous. People who don’t care about the primary source are not going to follow a link to, e.g., a court ruling, government report, fed minutes, a leaked document, a research paper, etc; but those who are interested are going to immediately leave the site and likely not come back for a long while.

Am I missing something?

And how many people could actually understand that paper? Anyone who could would find it easily enough.

That's not a reason for omitting the link to the original source. If anything, it would help illustrate the value of science journalism/reporting.

You're looking for evidence that providing external links might lead to users visiting those external links? I'm not sure what you're doubting here, it's a pretty typical "web user behavior", if you've ran a website before. Any exit points you provide leads to more users leaving at those points.

The KPIs these websites use to measure "how good an article is" is (among other things) how long time people "spend" on the article. Remove all external links, and it'll at least look like people engage for longer with the content. Does it make sense? No, but won't stop the people who run the business to believe so.

> The KPIs these websites use to measure "how good an article is" is (among other things) how long time people "spend" on the article

The Times earns most of its revenue from subscriptions. And knowing a few folks on their tech team, I can tell you dwell is far from their North Star.

I would in general agree with you, but having read through the journal paper: I think the fraction of general audience newspaper readers who could actually read that paper is very low. I come from a science background, spent time dabbling in time and frequency measurement enough to understand some of the concepts, and still found it a painful slog. (I am very much not a physicist!)

I still think it's the right practice for newspapers to always link to the primary source, but in this particular case I understand why they might make an editorial decision not to.

This is actually very rare for the New York Times - they're the only major publication that regularly links to the original sources.

To address some of the most pressing open questions in fundamental physics, such as the origin and properties of dark matter...

Owing to unknown nuclear parameters, precise values of these sensitivity factors cannot at present be calculated, but it is predicted that they will exceed those of the most sensitive atomic clock transitions by several orders of magnitude.

So when you achieve FTL, the Vulcans show up.

Who (or what) shows up when you solve the riddle of dark matter?

The Langoliers of course.

since NYT didn't bother linking to it

The solution to your complaint is right at the end of the article:

"We acknowledge mistakes in our reporting with corrections. If you spot an error, please let us know at corrections@nytimes.com."

That's one of the big differences between journalism and mere blogging.

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