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 ...

Wondering why the United States measures things in inches and pounds? The answer will definitely surprise you All countries use the metric system to varying degrees. Most of the world has adopted the ...

In prehistoric times, not much needed to be measured. You ate what you found and lived where you could. The advent of agriculture and civilization, however, necessitated a way for people to measure ...

Nick van Remortel demystifies natural unit systems — and advises what to do when you see a mass expressed in GeV. Several unit systems for describing the natural world exist. The International System ...

The United States is one of just three countries that "prefers" imperial measurements over the international metric standard. The motivation why has less to do with official policy than you might ...

Taking the first steps of what would be a major historical advance in the science of measurement, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology is participating in a worldwide effort to ...

SI Units: In our daily lives, we use measurements constantly, whether it is checking the temperature, weighing vegetables, or measuring the distance between two places. But imagine how confusing it ...

A metric prefix is a numerical multiplier that is placed before a basic unit of measure to indicate a specified multiple or fraction of that unit. The 20 recognized metric prefixes have been specified ...