A high-tech version of an old-fashioned balance scale at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has just brought scientists a critical step closer toward a new and improved ...

Lego is a popular Christmas gift, and young and old alike can derive hours of pleasure building with those little plastic blocks. But, like a lot of playthings, the novelty wears off soon enough and ...

The kilogram — anywhere in the world, for any purpose — is based on the exact weight of a golf-ball-sized chunk of platinum and iridium stored under three glass bell jars in a vault in an ornate ...

Physicists in the US say that they have used publicly available data from global positioning system (GPS) satellites to put a limit on how much Planck’s constant might vary from place to place. Their ...

Planck’s constant is one of the most important numbers in science. It describes the relationship between the energy and frequency of an electromagnetic wave in an equation known as the Planck-Einstein ...

Researchers from the CNRS and Université de Sherbrooke, have discovered a universal law for the electronic properties of high-temperature superconductors. They exposed superconductors to an intense ...

For nearly 130 years, the kilogram has been defined by a small platinum and iridium cylinder sitting in a vault outside Paris. Every other unit of measurement is defined by reproducible physical ...

Planck's constant is one of the fundamental constants that sets up all the "rules" for how things work in our universe. (It’s named after the theoretical physicist Max Planck, who is best known for ...

A high-tech version of a balance scale has just brought scientists a critical step closer toward a new and improved definition of the kilogram. The scale, called the NIST-4 watt balance, has conducted ...