If scientists had sacred objects, this would be one of them: a single, closely guarded 137-year-old cylinder of metal, housed in a vault outside of Paris. It is a prototype that precisely defines a ...

Officials with the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) have announced that at a meeting to be held next week, four of the base units used in the metric system will be redefined. The four ...

Scales aren't changing and the weather won't be noticeably different, but on May 20 the definitions that underlie what your scale and thermometer report—along with standard definitions used in ...

Humans have a need to quantify things. And sometimes the usual measurements — feet, meters, grams — are not good enough. Or funny enough. Sometimes you need to express things in bananas, Helens, or ...

Measurement systems exist to make sense of the world — but nobody told scientists, engineers, and internet culture that they had to stay serious about it. Alongside the perfectly respectable meter, ...

Meters, kilograms, degrees Celsius. To most Americans, these units of measurement are little more than funny inconveniences on trips abroad. To scientists, they’re the very standards that allow for ...

If you’re from the US or are trying to understand American units of measure, there’s now an easier way to do that with Uniter. This is a new iPhone app that can convert measurements in real-time in ...