When former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee announced he was joining the 2016 Democratic primary race, some people scratched their heads when he said switching to the metric system would be one of ...

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 ...

Former President Gerald Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act 50 years ago. However, he did not make metric adoption mandatory, and the efforts fell flat. For a look at where metric measurements have ...

The humorist Dave Barry has more than once suggested "millipedes" as an imaginary unit of measurement (for example, 120 miles = 2,342,424,323.3432 millipedes), poking fun at the inscrutability of the ...

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 ...

Americans have long used diverse weights and measures, reflecting their diverse origins. From colonial times, converting from one unit to another was part of courses in commercial arithmetic. The ...

Who doesn’t like a math pop quiz when driving down to the Mexican border? If you turn onto Interstate 19, which runs 63 miles (101 kilometers) from Tucson, Arizona, down to Mexico, the road signs ...

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 ...

When Sally Mitchell, a science teacher at East Syracuse Minoa Central High in Syracuse, New York, spoke to a group of students at the recent U.S. Department of Energy National Science Bowl, she ...