leap

Several major websites were briefly knocked offline this past weekend by a quirk in the calendar: a 'leap second' -- the rare additional tick added worldwide to clocks that fixes a natural flaw in our time-keeping systems. The 'leap second' is used ... around the world on computerized time systems because a year on our clocks is slightly shorter than the actual the time it takes the Earth to go once around the sun. Nowadays, we take most of our time signals from an atomic clock, which measures the vibrations of atoms in a metal called cesium so accurately that a one second error is nearly as ... (view more)