On July 1, 1742, German scientist, satirist and Anglophile Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was born. He is remembered best for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modeled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and his aphorisms.
At NIST's Time and Frequency lab in Colorado, scientists build precision clocks from elements like mercury and ytterbium. The instruments harness general relativity to detect a range of conditions and situations, from heart defects to subterranean oil fields. Just don't ask them what time it is.