Humans have a need to quantify things. And sometimes the usual measurements — feet, meters, grams — are not good enough. Or funny enough. Sometimes you need to express things in bananas, Helens, or ...

When someone tells you they'll be "back in two shakes!" they are guaranteed to take much, much longer than that — at least if we're talking shakes in the sense used by physicists. The shake is a unit ...

Meters, kilograms, degrees Celsius. To most Americans, these units of measurement are little more than funny inconveniences on trips abroad. To scientists, they’re the very standards that allow for ...

Are you getting bored with our current units of measurement? Do you constantly weigh the pros and cons of the United States switching over to the metric system, and wonder if there was a better option ...