Shrinking kilogram bewilders physicists

Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, with a copy of the 118-year-old cylinder that has been the international prototype for the metric mass, in his office in Sevres, southwest of Paris.AP

Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies.

"The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart," he said. "We don't really have a good hypothesis for it."