An attempt to eliminate leap seconds and permanently change how time is measured has been postponed until 2015 by the International Telecommunications Union.

Leap seconds are tiny bits of time added to calendars and clocks in hopes of reconciling the difference between atomic time used by computer systems and time as defined by measuring the Earth’s movement around the sun and its daily, but slightly slowing, rotation.

Researchers have found that an atomic clock at the U.K.'s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has the best long-term accuracy of any other clock in the world.

A team of physicists from the United States and Russia announced today* that it has developed a means for computing, with unprecedented accuracy, a tiny, temperature-dependent source of error in atomic clocks.

The world's best caesium atomic clocks control Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), an atomic time scale on which the time zones used in everyday life are based.