Scientific American's current issue is

Scientific American's current issue is about TIME.

"Punctuality comes from within, not from without," writes Harvard University historian David S. Landes in his book Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. "It is the mechanical clock that made possible, for better or worse, a civilization attentive to the passage of time, hence to productivity and performance."

A team from France and the Netherlands set a new speed record for subdividing the second, reporting last year that a laser strobe light had emitted pulses lasting 250 attoseconds--that's 250 billionths of a billionth of a second. The strobe may one day be fashioned into a camera that can track the movements of individual electrons. The modern era has also registered gains in assessing big intervals. Radiometric dating methods, measuring rods of "deep time," indicate how old the earth really is.