SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Ready Your Watch: The Leap Second Is Coming
from Wired Science
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) in Paris--the grand arbiters of time on our big blue marble--has declared that a leap second will be introduced on 30 June, 2012.
So what on Earth is a leap second? We used to use the Earth's dutiful rotation as a way of measuring time. It pirouettes on its axis once every 24 hours, which can then be divided into minutes and seconds. But the Earth's rotation is annoyingly irregular, with some days ending up being a tiny bit longer or shorter than others.
There's nothing science hates more than unpredictability, so in the 1950s atomic clocks were introduced to keep time.
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