Gadgets & Gizmos: The slowing world, fishing for iPhones and AI cracking Napoleon's code

But actually, the world has been slowing down.

Oh,

so it's longer than that.

Over the last few million years, yes, it's definitely been slowing down.

So back in the days of the dinosaurs, the Jurassic, the Triassic, the whatever all the other ones are called, a day only lasted 23 and a half hours.

And now, as you know, it's a full 24 hours.

And scientists have been worried about this because, of course...

The length of a day is no longer measured by the position of the sun, but by some obscure calculation involving the wavelength of cesium.

Of course it

is,

yes.

So some years ago, scientists came up with the idea of the leap second.

And the leap second has added as and when needed in order to regulate the time and put it in time with the real time.

There have been 27 leap seconds added since 1972.

And that was okay when all people had to do was move their clocks on by a second.

But now that everything is very digital, back in 2012, they added a leap seconds and websites crashed and flights were delayed because the computer simply couldn't cope with there being 61 seconds in an hour, in a minute.

Well, the problem now is the world seems to be speeding up again.

And there is apparently a 30% probability that there's going to have to be a negative leap second, which means we have to take a second off the clock at some point.

And this is bothering lots of people because of the chaos it'll cause.

So the International Bureau of Weights and Measures have been debating this problem for about 30 years now.

And they have come up with the leap hour.

And the leap hour will replace leap seconds.

Wow.

Which, of course, will

cause no problems at all to anybody.