You Gained One Additional Second In Your Life This Year

According to World Official Timekeeper, one second will be added to the end of this year, 2008, to keep up with the slow rotation of the earth's revolution. A positive leap second will be introduced in UTC on December 31, 2008. The Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) sequence will be as follow:

31 DEC 2008 23 HOURS 59 MINUTES 59 SECONDS
31 DEC 2008 23 HOURS 59 MINUTES 60 SECONDS
01 JAN 2009 00 HOURS 00 MINUTES 00 SECONDS

The additional leap second is added to the atomic time in order to decrease the difference between the length of the solar day and the civil time. The leap second can either be positive or negative, depending on the Earth's rotation.

Since the first leap second in 1972, all leap seconds have been positive and there were 23 leap seconds in the 34 years to January, 2006. This pattern generally reflects the slowing trend of the Earth due to tidal braking