Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The inch, based on the length of a thumb, and the foot based on, well, the length of a foot, are inherently associated with human ...

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 ...

Now that the United Kingdom is outside the European Union, it’s reviewing thousands of EU rules and regulations to see which it should jettison. Among them is the compulsory use of the metric system ...

The US is wrong and metric is best.

We’ll blame Thomas Jefferson. Oh, not entirely; there are more than 200 years’ worth of criticism to dole out. But in wondering why the United States is not entirely on the metric system, the blame ...

If you know your U.S. history, there have been several attempts to adopt the metric system, all to no avail. It's the universal standard for most of the world and way more intuitive, yet the chances ...

Meet the metric system’s newest prefixes: ronna-, quetta-, ronto- and quecto-. Science News spoke with Richard Brown, head of metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, ...

A mural of a 30-meter-long blue whale covers the basketball court at Santa Barbara Charter School. (Courtesy photo) Santa Barbara Charter School has secured a $5,000 grant from the Santa Barbara ...

Now that the kilogram is disassociated from its physical form, it can be measured anywhere. At least that's the theory behind a prototype of a device called a Kibble, built by scientists at the ...