Meeting in Versailles, France, on Friday, the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) has called time-out on “leap seconds” – the little jumps occasionally added to clocks running on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), to keep them in sync with Earth’s rotation.
From 2035, leap seconds will be abandoned for 100 years or so and will probably never return. It’s time to work out exactly what to do with a problem that has become increasingly urgent, and severe, with the rise of the digital world.
