December 23, 2025, marks the 50th anniversary of the Metric Conversion Act, designed to bring US weights and measures in line with the rest of the world. The United States is one of the last holdouts ...

Expats and tourists from the United States come to Costa Rica with a handicap. While most of the rest of the world, including Costa Rica, is using the metric system, the U.S., despite several efforts ...

In the supermarket, on the street and in bars, Europeans have long thought in units of 10 — fruit is weighed by the kilo, beverages dispensed by fractions of a liter and distances marked off in meters ...

May is a month full of celebrations—everything from May Day and Cinco de Mayo to Mother’s Day and Memorial Day. Largely forgotten in the cornucopia of May celebrations, however, is National Metric ...

Have you ever noticed that systems of measurement tends to change when you leave the United States? Weight is typically measured in kilograms instead of pounds, distance is measured in kilometers over ...

Metric units are universally followed in most countries. The metric system was first introduced in France in 1799 and since then has been further refined and has become an international decimalised ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American I’ve met a lot of people and learned a lot ...