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...historic docks of Rotterdam to China's booming trading hub of Ningbo, troubling symptoms abound. The Baltic Dry Index, which tracks the cost of shipping raw materials, has plummeted from an all-time high of 11,793 last May to below 800, a 22-year low. The daily rental rate for the largest bulk carriers plunged from $234,000 last summer to less than $3,000 in early December, a staggering 99% reduction. "The violence of the drop is more extreme than anything we've ever seen before," says Jeremy Penn, chief executive of the London-based Baltic Exchange...
...clocks around the world to realign Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the international standard for atomic clocks, with Earth's rotational period. The reason for the intermittent mismatch between these two measurements lies not with the clocks but with the movement of the planet, which is decelerating at an average rate of two milliseconds...
...ahead of the Earth-moon alignment; the moon's gravity, however, yanks the bulges back to keep them in line. This tug-of-war - essentially a transfer of energy between the Earth and the moon - boosts the moon's orbital momentum, pushing it away from the Earth at a rate of 1.6 inches a year (the moon's distance from us will increase by the length of a football field over the course of 2,250 years), while reducing the Earth's rotational speed and lengthening the day. (See pictures of Earth from space...
...adjusted by adding a leap second each time an appreciable discrepancy was detected by observations made at the International Earth Rotation Service in Paris. Since then, 24 leap seconds have been added, either on June 30 or Dec. 31; the last one was tacked on in 2005. At that rate, "it will be 5,040 years before we gain an extra hour," Novick says...
...years, dismaying potential admits—particularly at Deep Springs, a two-year college with a long tradition of Harvard transfers. And spurred by this same caution about residential constraints, the admissions office took a conservative approach to applicants for the class of 2012, announcing the lowest admissions rate in recent memory, before admitting an unprecedented 200 students off the wait list when its acceptance rate dropped slightly...