is a senior reporter who has covered AI, robotics, and more for eight years at The Verge. Update, May 20th, 2019, 10AM ET: This article was originally published in November 2018. As of May 20th, 2019, ...

The NIST-4 Kibble balance, an electromagnetic weighing machine that is used to measure Planck's constant, and in turn, redefine the kilogram. Jennifer Lauren Lee / NIST Locked in a vault that requires ...

The 'one kilogram to rule them all' was cast in platinum and iridium in 1879 and is kept in a triple-locked vault THE world says goodbye to the original kilogram on May 20, on World Metrology Day.

After decades of study, testing and arguments, scientists could be about to reach an agreement on what a kilogram is. The mass of a kilogram, currently, is defined by a physical object - it's called ...

Much to the consternation of scientists, the cylindrical platinum-iridium artifacts that represent the kilogram (see image above) have been gradually packing on extra weight due to surface ...

Deep underneath the Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud, in a vault that can only be opened by three people wielding three different keys, there lies a hunk of metal that is so crucial to the world of ...

Post-Christmas and most of us are feeling the over-indulgence. But take heart - experts at Newcastle University, UK, have shown even the kilogram itself has put on weight. Using a state-of-the-art ...

A kilogram is a kilogram, right? Not in the way we measure it, say physicists in Lower Saxony – who are working on a new way to determine the mass . Heavily guarded in a Paris vault, one piece of ...

Within a high-security, climate-controlled vault in France, the perfect kilogram is getting ever so slightly less massive—and no one knows why. Sèvres*, France—What I love best about the kilogram is ...

The standard unit for the kilogram weight – known as the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK) – is likely to be heavier now than when it was first introduced in 1875, scientists believe. This is ...

Using a state-of-the-art Theta-probe XPS machine, experts in the UK have shown the original kilogram is likely to be tens of micrograms heavier than it was when the first standard was set in 1875. And ...