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The solar day is 24 hours long. That's the time it takes the Earth to complete one full rotation on its axis, and as far as humans can tell, this is very accurate. However, we live in a world of high-precision machines that deal with the effects of physics that we don't feel. For the machines, a 24-hour day is definitely not exact. Left to their own devices, clocks will slowly go out of sync, which is not exactly ideal. Since the 1970s, authorities have been mitigating this by adding a leap second every so often in order to keep...

At 8.45 on the morning of 15 April 136 BC, Babylon was plunged into darkness when the Moon passed in front of the Sun. An astrologer, who recorded the details in cuneiform characters on a clay tablet, wrote: "At 24 degrees after sunrise-a solar eclipse. When it began on the southwest side, Venus, Mercury and the normal stars were visible. Jupiter and Mars, which were in their period of disappearance, became visible. The Sun threw off the shadow from southwest to northeast." If present-day astronomers use a computer to run the movements of the Earth, Moon and Sun backwards...

Mysterious Shift in Earth's Gravity Suggests Equator is Bulging By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 02:00 pm ET 01 August 2002 Something strange has been going on under our feet for the past four years. Earth's gravity field suddenly shifted gears and began getting flatter, reversing a course of centuries during which the planet and its gravity field grew rounder each year. The scientists who noticed the change and report it in the Aug. 2 issue of the journal Science suspect Earth itself may be flattening out, with the oceans rising near the equator, but they aren't...

As ice melts away from Antarctica, parts of the continental bedrock are rising in response -- and other parts are sinking, scientists have discovered. snip Before POLENET and its more spatially limited predecessors, scientists had few direct measurements of the bedrock. They had to rely on computer models, which now appear to be incorrect. "When you compare how fast the earth is rising, and where, to the models of where ice is being lost and how much is lost -- they don't match," Wilson said. "There are places where the models predict no crustal uplift, where we see several millimeters...