Results: 2024 is a Leap Year!

The thing to know is that leap year exists, in large part, to keep the months in sync with annual events, including equinoxes and solstices, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. It's a correction to counter the fact that Earth's orbit isn't precisely 365 days a year. The trip takes about six hours longer than that, NASA says. Did you know the reason for a leap year?

What would happen without a leap year? Eventually, nothing good in terms of when major events fall, when farmers plant and how seasons align with the sun and the moon. "Without the leap years, after a few hundred years we will have summer in November," said Younas Khan, a physics instructor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "Christmas will be in summer. There will be no snow. There will be no feeling of Christmas." Which of these no leap year effects would yoi be okay with?

Bizarrely, leap day comes with lore about women popping the marriage question to men. It was mostly benign fun, but it came with a bite that reinforced gender roles. There's distant European folklore. One story places the idea of women proposing in fifth century Ireland, with St. Bridget appealing to St. Patrick to offer women the chance to ask men to marry them, according to historian Katherine Parkin in a 2012 paper in the Journal of Family History. Do you know any women who have proposed to men on a leap year?