Isn’t this interesting.

The bones of the king under the car park have delivered further shocks, 527 years after his death and more than two years after his remains were discovered in Leicester: Richard III was a blue-eyed blond, and the present Queen may not be descended from John of Gaunt and Edward III, the lineage on which the Tudor claim to the throne originated.

Five anonymous living donors, all members of the extended family of the present Duke of Beaufort, who claim descent from both the Plantagenets and Tudors through the children of John of Gaunt, gave DNA samples which should have matched Y chromosomes extracted from Richard’s bones. But none did.

Since Richard’s identity was proved by his mitochondrial DNA, handed down in an unbroken chain through the female line from his sister to two living relatives, the conclusion is stark: there is a break in the claimed line of Beaufort descent, what the scientists described as “a false paternity event”, which may also affect the ancestry of their distant cousins, the Windsors.

via Questions raised over Queen’s ancestry after DNA test on Richard III’s cousins | UK news | The Guardian.

This is a fascinating account of the modern tools we use to keep track of time, and the growing problems we face as our drive towards time accuracy conflicts increasingly with the imperfections of our terrestrial and celestrial home.

The frequency of the transition of strontium, for example, is 444,779,044,095,486.71 Hz. A strontium clock developed in the US would only have lost a second since the earth began: it is accurate to a second in five billion years.

The scientists at NPL reckon optical clocks that keep time to within one second in 14 billion years are on the horizon – that’s longer than the universe has been around.

via BBC News – Caesium: A brief history of timekeeping.