OK. Dunno what to say there. I thought the article was misleading because it was intentionally sensationalized, not due to some lack of intellectual capability

OK. Dunno what to say there. I thought the article was misleading because it was intentionally sensationalized, not due to some lack of intellectual capability or because it wasn't addressed at an audience with a background in the subject. I'm sure that I know less about the subject than everyone interviewed in in the article. If anything, I think knowledge makes it better, since you're not likely to be mislead by it. Wrt relativistic effect, the first NIST paper I cited shows that they needed altitude uncertainty less than 1m to avoid redshift from dominating the clock's error. The second shows that for the improved F2 reference redshift is one of the largest sources of uncertainty (and the corrected part is orders of magnitude larger than the other listed systemic errors). It's really cool, I agree. I'm happy to have people share in enjoying that, but sad about whatever causes the press to always have to present things as new and categorically different than what came before. There are a number of really cool things they didn't mention: For example, these optical lattice clocks that they're talking about are solid state-- involving mostly only lasers and vacuum cells. Unlike cesium based atomic clocks, they may have reasonable prospects of being mass produced inexpensively in the future, and efforts to do this are being funded by DARPA (useful for many military applications, like jamming systems and anti-jamming, navigation, and various sensing applications). So unlike the state of the art atomic references these things may someday show up in very inexpensive equipment, and allow for some fun science experiments, improvements to reliable distributed systems, long baseline amateur radio astronomy, etc. Or, Tom Van Baak measuring gravitational redshift with a minivan and some old HP cesium beam clocks. okay, not "floor to wall", but if you haven't read his presentation on it, you should, it's a load of fun and IMO, more accessible in that it's not talking about technology that exists in a rats nest of cables on an optical table in a single lab, but just old junk you can find surplus. :)