On June 30 2015 at 23:59:59 UTC (19:59:59 EDT), artist Sara Morawetz was standing in the middle of New York’s Times Square with a pair of cymbals. As the clock ticked to the next second, she struck the cymbals together.

This simple performance, titled 61/60, sought to highlight the strange blip of time where the clock read 23:59:60 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), instead of 00:00:00 UTC.

Since 1972, extra seconds, known as leap seconds, have been added to clock time whenever our slightly wobbly Earth falls out of sync with atomic clocks (which run more consistently). A total of 27 leap seconds have been added in those five decades.

They are therefore important in fields like astronomy because they keep the link between clock time and solar time – which is based on our planet’s movement.

But on Thursday 15 October, delegates at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) in Versailles, France, voted to abolish them, starting from 2027.

Their loss might seem trivial to some people. But in the field of precision timekeeping, leap seconds are highly controversial. They have the potential to affect everything from financial trading, telecommunications and the energy sector to data centres and the legal system.

In fact, they have threatened to interrupt any sector that requires accurate timing. For example, data centres use time synchronisation to ensure distributed servers work together effectively. In finance, time stamps ensure orders are carried out accurately and provide an audit trail for complying with regulations.

When a leap second was added in 2012, it caused websites such as Reddit and Linkedin to crash and Qantas airline flights to be delayed.

In the reporting on today’s decision, these risks to computing systems are often described as the main reason for the end of leap seconds, but in fact the risk was to the single globally accepted standard of time.

Big tech concerns

In 2008, when a leap second was due to be added to the clock on December 31, Google was unwilling to risk adding it in a single step. Instead, the tech giant’s time servers deviated from UTC for a period of 20 hours, “smearing” the extra second across this time period in increments that were so small their systems did not notice them.

Effectively, Google determined that UTC was not suitable for its needs and invented its own form of clock time in response. Increasingly, other corporations adopted their own workarounds, raising concerns about the ability of UTC to retain its position as the pre-eminent determination of time.

As a result, conversations within the international bodies responsible for standardisation have, in recent years, focused on the ways that the current model of clock time no longer works as a standard for all.

As Mario Maniewicz, director of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU-R), has argued, clock time needs to be updated so that it can meet the needs of 21st century users.

At the 2022 CGPM, it had already been agreed by delegates that, by 2035, UTC would effectively be free of leap seconds. However, recent predictions of future changes in Earth’s rotation raised the possibility of the first negative leap second, where a second is subtracted rather than added to the clock.

Alarm over the unprecedented impact this situation could have led to it being likened to a new Y2K event. The increased risk of losing users of UTC to forms of timekeeping that do not require leap second adjustments led to the proposal agreed at Versailles, namely to bring forward the end of leap seconds to May 20 2027.

Meeting needs

UTC has thus been redefined so that it can be reasserted as a shared standard, free of the controversy it once held for many economic activities.

As I’ve argued previously, the leap second debate has shown that our usual ideas of clocks as abstract, mathematical and objective are incorrect. These ideas do not take into account the way that clocks are designed tools that are reformulated when needs shift.

Global computing and tech companies now have the time they need for their systems to work more smoothly. But astronomers will no longer be able to use UTC as a broad proxy for the Earth’s rotation as they did before. The proposal brought before the CGPM mentions this, but more or less says they will need to look elsewhere for their requirements.

The implication of the decision seems to be that computing needs have been placed above the requirements of other sectors. But the larger question raised by today’s decision at the CGPM is one the broader public has rarely asked, namely what other “user needs” are going unmet by the assumption that all human activities can be coordinated by a single standardised clock time? Astronomy provides one example of this, but our own experiences of pressure and anxiety around time suggest there are others.

Can we reinvent time?

There is a strange kind of audacity in even considering the idea of changing clock time to suit our own needs. Google was able to do it in part because it is big enough to do so.

But think about the common habit of running our clocks slightly fast to help with getting to meetings on time. This is done so often that Apple had to introduce an official feature to its smart watch allowing people to set it to the wrong time on purpose.

Public clocks do this occasionally too, such as the turret clock on the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh. Since 1902, the clock has run three minutes fast to help travellers arrive on time at the nearby Waverley train station. There are also clocks that let you track time outside of the UTC standard that was redefined today.

Designer Scott Thrift has built a clock called The Present which features a single hand that moves with the changing seasons across a full year. Thrift described The Present as “no hours, no minutes, no numbers. Only the bigger picture”. US scientists working on Mars missions created their own watches to track Martian days (called sols) which run longer than Earth days.

Many people may think of clock time as immovable and inevitable. As the latest vote shows, the “shape” of the clock remains up for debate. Currently, if you are big enough it will bend to your needs. We need to decide if we are happy to just leave the big players to it.

Michelle Bastian does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The AI doomsday news cycle plays on anxieties about the future. The media has tended to prioritise sensational takes on the risk at the expense of more thoughtful opinions by, for example, experts in the ethics of AI.

Alarmist fantasies of superintelligence – where artificial intelligence surpasses that of the most gifted human minds – are criticised for distracting from real concerns and threats. AI is energy hungry, environmentally damaging, and has prompted urgent calls for legislation relating to a slew of ethical concerns.

Apocalyptic AI visions drawn from science fiction engage public interest. One fascinating scenario can be found in the 2018 movie Annihilation, starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac. The film is being released in the 4K Ultra HD home media format in the UK and US in October.

Annihilation features an “alien intelligence” – a popular analogy for AI among tech leaders – which embeds itself within Earth’s environment. Can such visions be useful to the current real-world doomsday debate?

Sci-fi could help reframe the real-world narrative in positive ways. There are strange techno-futurist and eugenicist visions at play within Silicon Valley, which appear popular with some tech billionaires.

These are linked to dark enlightenment thinking – a movement that rejects liberal democracy and egalitarianism – as well as effective altruism (attempting to impartially calculate benefits to provide the greatest good). These visions encompass long-term perspectives that accept present-day sacrifice for future wellbeing.

The future-oriented visions expressed by some tech leaders can be surreal, but they reflect the belief systems fuelling the drive for AI superintelligence. And that raises important questions, right now, about whose vision of the future we are investing in.

Alex Garland’s sci-fi horror film Annihilation takes us into these issues through one of the weirdest sci-fi visions that’s out there. It is loosely adapted from a novel by Jeff VanderMeer.

Termed the Shimmer, because it radiates energy, the AI steadily expands its reach (starting from Florida swampland) by operating as a networked entity beyond human control. It changes everything within its domain. People, animals, and plants mutate in unpredictable ways, seemingly infected by a strange parasite.

The story focuses on an expedition team, including genetics expert Lena (Portman), who enter the Shimmer seeking answers. They discover that all electromagnetic waves and DNA are being disrupted and reconfigured.

The Shimmer is interfering with the fundamental patterns of life, redefining evolutionary code. Among other things, the Shimmer learns to clone humans. This enables it to exist within human-type bodies anywhere on Earth.

Both extinction and immortality

Annihilation toys with different types of human extinction. Terminal extinction refers to humanity dying out while leaving a successor species, a bit like the concept of a human’s consciousness being uploaded onto a machine. Final extinction is when humanity ends, full stop.

When tech billionaires stumble over questions about wanting humanity to endure, they are probably thinking of terminal extinction. Surreal as it sounds, this magical thinking is a recurrent feature of the AI landscape.

Annihilation leaves the viewer to decide which form of human termination is occurring. The film draws on Garland’s deep fascination with AI. His debut as a director, Ex Machina, explored a humanoid robot passing the Turing test and breaking free from human control.

His television series Devs visualises a world where a quantum supercomputer has “godlike” capabilities.

Annihilation’s organic body horror uses imagery of destroyed, mutated, and cloned bodies to reflect profound social anxiety about humanity’s future. As Garland himself has suggested in an interview, there is a form of digital spirituality fuelling the tech billionaire drive for AI superintelligence and his sci-fi work explores this concept in various ways.

AI as parasite

Annihilation is weird but it makes sense through the parasite theory of communication. The French philosopher and historian of science Michel Serres expanded upon biological parasites to develop a media and communications theory. In it, he argued that all forms of interaction involve disruption and noise.

Whether intentional or not, within every interaction there is always some kind of human or non-human disruption at play. Think in terms of glitches and interference while using digital devices, background noise, changeable environments, uninvited guests and any other distraction. According to Serres’ idea, these can all be visualised as forms of parasite feeding on attempts to interact.

In some instances, the parasite takes over – the disruptor displaces the host. If the impact of a parasitical disruptor is significant, it can change society forever. Disruption is a popular term in technology, and AI can be seen as a global disruptor.

But disruption shouldn’t be viewed as inherently negative. In fact, disruption is generally considered a form of positive change because it offers new tools, systems and processes that displace the current methods and structures available to humans in everyday life.

But it raises the key issue of whose interests, ethics and beliefs are being propagated and served by the impact of AI as a disruptor. Annihilation visualises a parasitical disruptive force embedded within the environment, which invites comparison with the darker areas of techno-futuristic visions from Silicon Valley and beyond. Like the Shimmer, AI is not going away; it just keeps changing form.

More importantly, Annihilation shows how small-scale changes can build towards global impacts. The story to engage with isn’t the fantasy that AI superintelligence is about to dominate humanity – it’s the one about disruption and whether that is a net positive or negative for human society.

Changing how we think about and use AI requires critically examining it, disrupting the fantasy narrative, and redefining the discourse and direction of travel of this world-changing technology.

What Annihilation tells us is that becoming a disruptor can change our future visions and current realities in a positive way. It helps us see possibilities for a technological future that move beyond the human extinction trope.

Kevin Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit and posted at X last Tuesday, to over 25 million views, that “No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

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UK gardens took a battering this summer as a heat dome settled over western Europe, and much of the green and pleasant land turned a dusty beige.

Some areas went without rain for almost two months. The “joy of gardening” turned into waiting until the cooler evening period, then laboriously trailing out from the kitchen with buckets of water to keep the patio plants alive.

But as the rains begin to return, what can gardeners do to restore their garden’s lustre? And what have we learned as we look around our parched borders and fractured lawns?

Let’s start with the good news. Nature is resilient and many plants may still be alive despite appearing bedraggled, wilted or defoliated. They just implemented strategies that help them survive a drought.

Leaf wilting and abscission is the plant’s natural response to conserving water and protecting its vital phloem (which transports sugars from the leaves to the rest of the plant) and root tissues from desiccation.

So, gardeners don’t need to take the hacksaw to the shrub border yet with the notion of making a fresh start. They can check if individual woody plants are still alive by scraping off the epidermal cells (young bark) of the shoots with a thumbnail. If the phloem tissues below are green, life prevails.

Some of the garden’s woody plants may re-leaf again this autumn – or if they are herbaceous, throw up new shoots from the soil. But many will wait until next spring before investing in a new set of leaves or stems.

Gardeners should avoid the temptation to feed plants up (add fertiliser) now, as such chemicals placed on hard soils will simply wash away with the first rains, rather than be incorporated effectively into the soil. More than anything else, gardeners need patience at this time.

Some plants will have dead stems; these can be pruned out immediately. With perennial plants, though, it is worth hesitating before removing the whole specimen, as shoots can regenerate from the stem base or remaining root system.

Similarly, brown lawns will turn green again. However, if there are residual bare patches, new growth can be encouraged by sowing grass seed mixed in with sand in mid-to-late September.

Plants employ different strategies for survival based on the climate they evolved in, and we see a legacy of this in the cultivated species we use in the garden.

Those from high rainfall areas – such as certain rhododendron, pieris, hydrangea, magnolia and sorbus – struggled this summer. Hydrangea has limited capacity to control moisture loss, whereas more drought-adapted species such as cotinus can precisely regulate their stomatal pores (where CO₂ is absorbed and moisture vapour lost).

Other plants such as forsythia and fuchsia are chance takers, still trying to grow throughout a dry period by keeping their stomata open and just running the risk of water shortage. But these types of plants can come a cropper as water columns within their xylem vessels (which transport water and minerals from the roots to the rest of the plant) snap, causing the whole stem to fail.

Anecdotally, despite the harsh dry, hot conditions, some garden plants performed well this year. Salvia, verbena, lavander and, in my garden’s clay-based soils, roses flowered prolifically, even if their shoot growth was curtailed.

Rejuvenating your garden

For those gardeners keen to rejuvenate their dreary, desolate brown patches quickly, autumn bedding plants can help provide some late season cheer. Plants such as cyclamen, chrysanthemum, aster and winter pansies can be planted now as soil moisture is restored.

After a summer like this, some precious plant specimens will be lost, but many gardens should return to their former glories – if the UK experiences a cooler summer next year.

Over the longer term, as climate change moves the UK’s southern regions to something akin to a Mediterranean climate, some gardeners will need to adapt. Mainly, this will mean planting more Mediterranean flora.

Much more challenging, however, is the climate turbulence that accrues from climate change. This compounding of stresses – such as flooding in early summer followed by drought a few weeks later, not to mention more extreme events such as fire and high wind speed – is a much more difficult phenomenon for plants.

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Read more: A rollercoaster of weather extremes: drought and heatwaves are creating UK’s climate whiplash

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While research on this problem is still in its infancy, early results suggest that gardeners may need to look to plant species with multiple stress tolerances. Some garden plants that are popular in Britain, like buddleia, already have good resilience.

We can also look to new genotypes from the natural world. Plants from dry river beds, for example, cope well with both drought and flooding.

Plantlife with wide natural geographical distributions and weed-like strategies (where they grow and reproduce quickly) should also be brought into breeding programmes now, to help improve climate resilience in the garden plant palette.

Ross Cameron is an advisor to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). Some of the research outlined in this article has been funded by the RHS and other environmental charities. Ross does not receive any personal income from these affiliations.

Unlike Darwin, Wallace grew up among the middle class and had to work for a living. This dictated the contours of his life and research.

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That’s now just 1 billion years for all the apparatus to hit on the lucky combination randomly, unless we start with design principles.

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If you’re thinking about moving house or just feeling nosy about your neighbours, your first port of call may be an online property marketing site: Rightmove and Zoopla in the UK, Zillow in the US or Magic Bricks in India.

They offer 3D plans of their properties and a video walkthrough, sometimes with added interactive tools. It all seems very modern – yet it turns out, at least one pioneering London estate agent was offering its clients 3D visual walkthroughs long before the advent of commercial photography.

In the UK, estate agents came into being as a specialised profession in the mid-19th century, as rapid urbanisation and greater social and geographic mobility led to a dramatic increase in the demand for housing.

But in this pre-photography era, how did the Victorian era’s newly monied see what they could buy with their gains from trade or industry? One high-end London estate agent, Brooks & Green, came up with a novel answer.

In 1838, the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation, this Old Bond Street estate agent began advertising an early form of immersive visual technology called a “cosmorama”, to offer prospective buyers a virtual tour of the properties it was selling.

A cosmorama involved looking at paintings or artists’ prints through a large convex lens, which magnified the image and enhanced the perspectival depth, creating a basic 3D effect.

A blackened square frame between the lens and picture hid the edges – enhancing the viewer’s sense of looking at a large scene through an extended opening. Clever lighting effects further enhanced the depth and immersive effects.

To create this cosmoramic view, a skilled artist would have had to visit the estate to prepare the sketches. For 20 years, Brooks & Green promoted its “cosmoramic gallery” as a proto-version of a digital walkthrough. This was nearly 50 years before photography was widely used to advertise property.

The estate agent advertised heavily in the London press. An 1842 advert claimed its office property gallery included “several hundred views of different estates”. Prospective buyers of one property were promised an “aerial perspective, the site and architectural elevation of a mansion, the local scenery and features of a park [and] ornamental grounds”.

The viewing experience of the cosmorama supposedly offered much more realism and detail than a written prospectus – without rich London buyers having to travel miles to inspect the property in question.

But this service was definitely not available to ordinary families. Only high-value mansions and estates were valuable enough to be visualised in this way. Entrance to the Brooks & Green gallery was supposedly free, but you needed an admission card – probably granted only to those who looked like they had suitably deep pockets.

Exhibits around the world

For the first half of the 19th century, the cosmorama was one of the most common forms of visual show across Europe and the Americas. It was first revealed at a Paris exhibition in 1808 by the French showman Abbot Constant Gazzera. His success led to many more exhibitions throughout Europe during the 1820s and ‘30s.

In London, the Cosmorama Rooms opened in 1821 at 29 St James’s Street, moving to Regent Street in 1823. The gallery became one of the established London attractions for over 30 years. With Regent Street only a mile from Old Bond Street, it may have prompted an ambitious Brooks & Green employee to have the idea of using this innovation to market its property.

Also shown across Europe in pleasure gardens, popular science institutions, retail bazaars and fairgrounds, the cosmorama was successful because urbanisation and population growth had created a critical mass of middle-class audiences. It offered a new kind of immersive visual exhibition, reaching audiences who would never visit a fine-art gallery.

Cosmorama means “views of the world” in Greek. It was mainly used to display picturesque landscapes, renowned European sites and striking architectural interiors – such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the canals of Venice or the interior of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The interest in this device reflected the public’s growing desire to be cultivated, and to learn about the wonders of the wider world.

Fascination with 3D worlds

But the cosmorama is just part of the story of immersive pictorial entertainment from the early 19th century. Other popular technologies included peepshows, panoramas and dioramas, all of which offered users a sense of virtual travel.

Panoramas were large circular paintings – the Imax cinema of the age – and dioramas were illusionistic spectacles created from 3D models. At the same time, itinerant exhibitors of peepshow boxes travelled the country’s fairgrounds displaying scenes of national events and sensational murders. Picturegoing had become part of everyday life.

I came across the Brooks & Green adverts for its cosmorama in my research for a historical project led by the Universidade Lusófona in Lisbon, which has mapped cosmorama exhibits across Europe and beyond. In all, Curiositas: Peeping Before Virtual Reality has catalogued more than 650 cosmoramas in Portugal, Spain and the UK.

Many more of these devices were exhibited in countries as far apart as North America, Brazil, Cuba and Australia. The famous US showman P.T. Barnum installed a cosmoramic gallery in his American Museum in New York.

The cosmorama was ultimately superseded by the stereoscope, which also created a 3D photographic experience by looking through lenses. Thus, the cosmorama was an early part of the story of our fascination with virtual worlds – of being taken outside and beyond ourselves, and immersed in another environment.

John Plunkett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. He is the co-author of Popular Visual Shows 1800-1914: Picturegoing from Peep Shows to Film (Oxford University Press, 2025)

You’re heading to that beach vacation. Or maybe like us in Washington State, you’re sneezing and coughing from the sunbaked wildfire smoke.

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