The weak gravitational pull on a particle just half the mass of a grain of sand has been measured for the first time. This most precise measurement of its kind is a breakthrough towards the quantum ...

If scientists had sacred objects, this would be one of them: a single, closely guarded 137-year-old cylinder of metal, housed in a vault outside of Paris. It is a prototype that precisely defines a ...

A method for characterizing quantum measurement devices completes the suite of 'tomography techniques', which should enable us to learn all there is to know about a given quantum-physics experiment. A ...

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 ...

When it comes to measuring things, there are some odd units of measurement out there. While measuring in feet is standard, there are many weirder ways to measure. Did you know a hand is a unit of ...