An oft-repeated "weird fact" is the claim that, if not for the scourge of Caribbean piracy, the United States would have adopted the metric system in the 1790s, making it the country's standard ...

Metric was officially declared America’s preferred system of measurement in 1975, but the U.S. public has been slow to embrace it. What do Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States have in common?

The metric system vs. imperial system debate has raged on for years, but is one truly better? From NASA losing a $328 million spacecraft due to a conversion error to ...

All countries use the metric system to varying degrees. Most of the world has adopted the metric system as their official system of measurement with one major exception: the United States.

In other words, the French introduced not only national standards, but a system of standards. It survives today as the metric system.

The 20 recognized metric prefixes have been specified by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) for the International System of Units (SI), and are used to make describing quantities ...

Scientists have approved the introduction of four new prefixes that can be applied to units of measurement in the metric system. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

The metric system's governing body has added some new terms to help describe massive amounts of data. The General Conference on Weights and Measures last week added the prefixes "ronna" and "quetta." ...

The metric system is widely adopted worldwide, but we still use a base-60 system for timekeeping that predates the rest of the metric system. The French did attempt to “decimalize” timekeeping ...

That’s because I-19 is the only American highway that fully measures distance in kilometers, a relic of a failed effort in the 1970s for the U.S. to adopt the metric system. Some 50 years later ...