Fair game: Restoring technology neutrality through plug-in hybrid utility factor adjustment - International Council on Clean Transportation

For more than 50 years, humanity has used "leap seconds" to keep our clocks aligned with the rotation of the Earth. On Thursday, an international timekeeping body in France voted to do away with leap seconds and let the clocks slip until they're out of alignment by a full hour, which could take centuries or even millennia. The precise atomic time we use to track our days — developed in the 1950s and measured by tracking the natural vibrations of atoms — is slightly out of sync with solar time, which is based on the position of the sun in the sky relative to a specific location on Earth, because the planet's rotation has been gradually slowing. The leap second was introduced in 1972 as a way to correct the discrepancy. Ten seconds were added immediately, says Scott Beattie, lead of the frequency and time team at the National Research Council of Canada's Metrology Research Centre. Since then, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, which tracks the difference between the solar day and atomic time, has monitored the discrepancy to determine when an extra second is needed.

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