Gotta live, gotta live gotta live, in a crap town

It’s the scourge of tourist boards across Britain. Now the increasingly infamous publication "Crap Towns" has published its long list for 2013. Of 100 maligned British villages, towns, and cities on the list, a shortlisted 50 will be included in a book, "Crap Towns Returns," to be released in October. Readers nominate towns for inclusion in the list; these are often places they live in or grew up in and escaped from. Perpetuating a tradition of eloquent British miserabilism that stretches from Robert Burton’s 17th-century "Anatomy of Melancholy," through the poetry of Philip Larkin and the Gothic pop lyrics of The Smiths, "Crap Towns" encourages readers to supplement their nominations with lyrically bleak descriptions. The result is a publication the Sunday Telegraph has praised as a “Domesday book of misery.” It may well be utter misery to find the name of your town in that book, but there's no misery in the fact that scientists say they have found a more accurate way to measure time. We currently use atomic clocks to count the seconds, but tests on an alternative atomic timekeeper have revealed that it is more precise. The devices, called optical lattice clocks, lost just one second every 300 million years - making them three times as accurate as current atomic clocks. Writing in Nature Communications, the team said they offered a better system for defining the second. That's actually quite impressive, but another clock is also undergoing development - an ion clock. This clock loses just one second every few billion years, but because it relies on a single ion, it is not yet deemed to be stable enough for widespread use. So just stick to the optical lattice model until the ion clock can be perfected.