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Two days this summer have been unusually short, with the shortest expected on Aug. 5, leading global timekeepers to consider adding a negative leap second. The Earth's rotation has accelerated in recent decades, leading scientists to consider adding the first ever negative leap second. Earth is spinning so fast that global timekeepers are considering something that's never been done before: adding a negative leap second. So far this year, July 9 and July 22 have been unusually short — by about 1.3 and 1.4 milliseconds, respectively. However, Aug. 5 is expected to be even shorter, losing roughly 1.5 milliseconds, according...

A NASA spacecraft is again testing a creationist theory about the magnetic fields of planets. On 14 January 2008, the Messenger spacecraft, made by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA, flew by Mercury, the innermost planet of the solar system, in the first of several close encounters before it finally settles into a steady orbit around Mercury in 2011.[1] As it passed, its ‘magnetometer’ made quick measurements of Mercury’s magnetic field and transmitted them successfully back to Earth. Probably it will take the Messenger team several months to process the magnetic data accurately. I’m looking forward to...

Enlarge ImageIt's relative. Astronomers have been measuring spin precession in an eclipsing pair of pulsars.Credit: Daniel Cantin/McGill University As if his reputation needed cementing, astronomers have confirmed Albert Einstein's status as a supergenius once more. Studying a unique pair of pulsars--small and extremely dense leftovers from supernova explosions--researchers have measured an effect that was predicted by Einstein's 92-year-old general theory of relativity. The result, they report tomorrow in Science, is almost exactly what the famous physicist had foreseen. In Einstein's relativistic universe, matter curves space and slows down time, and the speed of light remains the only constant. But...