What will you do with your extra leap second tonight?

For just the 26th time since the arrival of atomic clocks, a leap second will be added tonight.

That means at 11:59 p.m. and 59 seconds UTC tonight – that’s 6:59 p.m. in Wichita – we’ll have an extra second. Instead of going straight to 7 p.m., you’ll have an extra second to take a deep breath – or at least a shallow breath – before tumbling into prime time. Physicists in Paris gathered together in January and decreed that an extra second was needed to put our clocks in sync with the Earth’s rotation.

A free second! In a world where there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, economists say, the physicists have produced free time. But what can you do with a single second?

One writer suggests smiling or laughing, which seems reasonable, but also taking a sip of water, which seems plausible but a little dangerous if you tried to sip and swallow in the same second.

This Youtube video plausibly suggest blinking, crushing a snowman or closing your book – but also look at Facebook? Can you imagine a more terrible way to take advantage of an extra second than to spend it on Facebook where one second is one minute is one hour – and suddenly they’re all gone.

As we all know, if something had happened a second later or a second earlier, the whole world could be different. (see the falling ladder in the video below)

Of course, we don’t actually get a free second of life. So don’t expect any babies’ lives to be miraculously saved in this year’s leap second.

It’s just that, as we measure seconds according to the oscillations of cesium-133, and package them up into comprehensible chunks, minutes, hours, days and years – this year, there will be one more second crammed in there with all the rest, floating off the end of the day like a fleck of dust, quickly blown away.

The total seconds you have to spend this leap-second-year, for the record: 31,536,001.

This story was originally published June 30, 2015 at 8:13 AM with the headline "What will you do with your extra leap second tonight?."