Did last New Year’s Eve seem a trifle tedious? Did your celebration go on a little too long? Maybe that’s because just before midnight Greenwich Mean Time—6:59:59 Eastern Standard Time to be exact—the international authority on timekeeping ordered everyone to wait a second. For the 23rd time since 1972, the International Earth Rotation and Reference System Service added an extra second to the time standard, a worldwide network of some 200 atomic clocks.
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