Temporal flux: why we need to keep adding leap seconds

By David Parkinson, the University of Queensland
Updated July 13 2015 - 10:13am, first published July 1 2015 - 2:25pm
There will be an extra second between 09:59:59 and 10:00:00 on July 1, 2015. Photo: Simon Schluter
There will be an extra second between 09:59:59 and 10:00:00 on July 1, 2015. Photo: Simon Schluter

On Wednesday at precisely 10am Australian Eastern Standard time, something chronologically peculiar took place: there was an extra second between 09:59:59 and 10:00:00.