The concept of a perpetual motion machine brings up images of con artists and snake oil.

Since the birth of the industrial revolution, tricksters have tried to sell the world on the impossible. But this one has the blessing of physicists at Berkely and others have been able to replicate their findings.

From New Scientist:

Now, in a paper published this week, Norman Yao at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have revealed a blueprint for making a time crystal. The recipe has already been followed by two teams.

For Yao’s time crystal, an external force – like the pulse of a laser – flips the magnetic spin of one ion in a crystal, which then flips the spin of the next, and so forth, setting the system into a repeating pattern of periodic motion.

Stay skeptical, but with just a touch of hope and wonder.