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 ...

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 ...

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 ...