Boffins quarrel over ridding world of leap seconds What should
set the time - atomic watches or the sunrise? The measurement
and regulation of time could start to change this week if an ITU
meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, gives the nod. International
Telecommunication Union members are discussing whether Co-
ordinated Universal Time (UTC) should be set using a system that
does not factor in the Earth's imperfect spin – which
necessitates the insertion of a leap second every so often so
clocks can stay precisely synchronised with the world's uneven
rotation. UTC is based on the planet's revolutions and
International Atomic Time (TAI), the latter of which is set by a
network of 300 atomic clocks that don't lose track of time. The
leap second was introduced in 1971 to keep the gap between the
atomic clocks and the time according to the Earth's rotation at
less than 0.9 seconds. UTC was preferred over TAI as the
standard time reference because it's more useful for mariners;
it was believed a system that factored i