I would have made a brilliant comment, but I don't have a clue what they are talking about.

Aplication Time allocation Teleportation to other areas Why not read your life input to redo some wrong paths

So the basic analogy: I push my kid on the swing with an initial larger push, followed by a push every two swings. To my bad eyesight, there was an imperceivable difference in swing between pushes and not. I just made a time crystal swing... : / Its not like I pushed the swing once and it went forever. Or that the swing started swinging before I pushed it because it knew I had the intention to do it.... I think they should test to see if matter is mostly empty space by throwing rocks at each other's heads. That would at least be something worth reading about.

Possible uses? first one that popped up to me is power generation even if on a small scale.Satellite,Probes, deep sea exploration drones.That is if it can be scaled up to volume that is functional.

What the article doesn´t say is how the atoms flipped, Did they flip individually, or did they all flip in unison. If they all flip in unison it could be a phenomenon similar to the laser itself. The alternative states might have an application, eventually.

sounds like they made a counter not any sort of time warping material

"papers were published on both sides of the argument: some giving evidence for why they were impossible" urh these are the kind of "scientiscist" who are ruining science, research and theorising. They have always existed but are becoming more and more preponderant in science.
Otherwise I still don't understand why Time Crystal can repeat the pattern of ion switching at regular interval indefinitely and why are these interval seemingly paired to the observer (other than quantum causality).
Also it's pretty crazy that ions switching seem to behave as some sort of engine start-up of which you have to turn the key twice for it to "roll" and once you get it rolling up to speed it will continue on, except not in a continuous manner but at regular intervals. It's like one out of two laser beam is redundant with the ions orientation, but still has to be done for the second beam to operate a switch. Too much weirdness, not enough explanation.

The article says "Over the next few years, papers were published on both sides of the argument: some giving evidence for why they were impossible, while others suggested potential methods for making them."
I'll bet none of those who said it's impossible were called Deniers or lost their research funding. No, this is real science. It's not a scam like man-made global warming created by Al Gore and others to make billions $ from the gullible.

Funny, I read an old Sci-Fi story from the 1930s Golden Age of Science Fiction where the Time Traveler used 'Yttrium' to power his Time travel machine.

Exactly which way is up-side-down & right-side-up for an ion?? I think this is an early April fools joke.