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LISA: I'm Lisa Mullins, and this is The World. You may be hearing a lot today about the Leap Second. The Leap Second has to do with Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT. That's the internationally agreed upon time standard. But GMT is based on the rotation of the Earth, and the Earth is rotating a little more slowly these days -- and that makes our little blue marble a pretty bad timekeeper, especially when compared with something called International Atomic Time, which is incredibly precise. And Atomic Time has come to dominate our electronic lives. Everything from satellite navigation to cell phone communications depend on it. “Well, something's got to give,” says David Rooney, Curator of timekeeping at The Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England.

DAVID: “Occasionally the two scales will drift apart, and when that happens, we need to insert an extra second to bring everything back into step. It's called a leap second, and the next one is tonight at midnight.”

LISA: Now, we could of course ditch GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) entirely and operate solely on atomic time, but over the course of 600 or 700 years, there could be trouble. We could wind up with the sun telling us it's time for supper and the clock saying, “get ready for breakfast.” Better to add that extra second tonight and keep our clocks consistent. “The extra tick of the clock, though, is not always easy to add, says David Rooney.

DAVID: All the different time providers have different ways of demonstrating the fact that 2008 is one second longer. Often, it's Big Ben from London, in the UK, tolling out the New Year's Eve midnight time signal. So the guys at Big Ben actually have to steer that Victorian clock to be one second late, and they do that by taking coins off the pendulum and making it, therefore, run a little bit slow until our chime has gone out and it's back to normal for 2009.”

LISA: By the way, we asked David Rooney what he plans to do with an extra second tonight. He paused for a second, and said he might see how much extra wine he can enjoy.

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