World votes to ditch leap seconds

Metrologists have agreed to stop adding ‘leap seconds’ to official clocks to keep them in sync with variations in Earth’s rotation. Leap seconds can disrupt systems based on precise timekeeping, because there’s no set way to integrate them (Google, for example, smears out the extra second in the 24 hours around midnight at coordinated universal time). To make matters worse, Earth’s rotation has sped up since 2020 — normally, over the long term, Earth’s rotation slows because of the pull of the Moon. So, for the first time, a leap second might need to be removed rather than added. The practice of adding leap seconds will be put on hold from 2035.