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If you’re fretting that 2008 is about to end, and that another year has slipped by, don’t panic: you do have some extra time on your hands. one second, to be precise.
On New Year’s Eve, the international authorities charged with keeping precise time will add a single second to our lives. It will be the 24th “leap second” since 1972, and the first since 2005.
If that doesn’t sound like a big deal, consider that in one second a cheetah can dash 34 yards, a telephone signal can travel 100,000 miles, a hummingbird can beat its wings 70 times, and eight million of your blood cells can die.
As the saying goes, every second counts. In the case of leap seconds, that is especially true.
Leap seconds are needed to reconcile two very different ways of measuring time. Traditionally, humankind has reckoned time by the spin of the Earth and its orbit around the sun. Under this astronomical arrangement, a second is one-86,400th of our planet’s daily rotation. But because of tidal friction and other natural phenomena, that rotation is slowing down by about two-thousandths of a second a day.
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