Represented by those characters: 子、丑、寅、卯、辰、巳、午、未、申、酉、戌、亥

Does anyone know in which situations they are used nowadays? (if used at all...)

Thanks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthly_Branches
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calendar

At our office in Tokyo our clocks and calendars actually do use this. Kind of cool. In china they are used on most of our calendars so I would say they are very much in use even thought they are "Traditional". Side note, most of those calendars etc also do use more modern ways of showing the data.

Thanks @Mandarinboy, I guess I'll have to pay more attention to calendars, I've actually never noticed those characters used for that purpose so was skeptical of what was written in Wikipedia ;)