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 ...

A unified measuring system allows people from different nations to trade with one another without doubting what they are getting. Many attempts to make units of measure standard have come and gone ...

On Wednesday, when former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee announced his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, his remarks on the occasion contained some of the usual sentiment about the ...

I was at the supermarket recently when I took note of something my eyes had passed thousands of times before. The cans of my favorite sodas were 12 ounces, while the bottles were 2 liters. It caught ...

If the United States were more like the rest of the world, a McDonald's Quarter Pounder might be known as the McDonald's 113-Grammer, John Henry's 9-pound hammer would be 4.08 kilograms, and any ...

officially use the metric system for weights and measurements. On the brink of Thursday’s Brexit vote, author Daniel Pink wonders when, if ever, the U.S. might join the rest of the metric world.

The United States is one of just three countries that "prefers" imperial measurements over the international metric standard. The motivation why has less to do with official policy than you might ...

The inch, based on the length of a thumb, and the foot based on, well, the length of a foot, are inherently associated with human scale (Getty/iStock) Sign up to our free Brexit newsletter for our ...

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 system ...