Technology at a Glance is a quarterly newsletter from the National Institute of Standards and Technology reporting on research results, funding programs, and manufacturing extension and technology services. If you have comments or general questions about this newsletter or if you would like to receive the four-page, color newsletter in hard copy, please email your mailing address to Gail Porter, editor, or call (301) 975-3392. About Technology at a Glance.

[Technology at a Glance Search] [Technology at a Glance Archives]

3-D Matrix Makes Immune Cells

New ways of fighting cancers and viral infections could result from recent advances in tissue engineering that created an “artificial thymus.” The engineered gland efficiently generates large quantities of a wide range of human T cells, a key element in the body’s immune system. The research by Cytomatrix (Woburn, Mass.) and Massachusetts General Hospital lays the foundation for possible new T cell therapies for intractable diseases and for repairing damaged immune systems. The work was supported in part by NIST’s Advanced Technology Program.

T cells are formed in the thymus and are responsible for highly specific immune responses, some directly attacking abnormal cells—such as cancers, cells invaded by a virus, or in transplanted tissue—and others controlling different aspects of the immune response, such as the production of antibodies. There are around a trillion possible T cell variations, and the average person may have millions of different T cells.

Current methods of growing T cells (e.g., in flat culture dishes) for therapeutic purposes are inefficient and cannot reprogram the cells to new tasks.

The Cytomatrix technique is not only more efficient but also produces many different T cells with a wide range of functional capabilities—because it works like a real thymus. The key insight was that the geometry plays a critical role in the maturation of T cells. Organs are three dimensional (3D), whereas culture plates are not. The researchers used a porous metal and carbon material created for bone repair as a 3-D matrix to support thymus cells from mice and T cell progenitor cells from human bone marrow.

The artificial thymus provides a testbed for developing methods to create supplies of T cells tailored to specific tasks.

Contact: Mark J. Pykett, Cytomatrix, (781) 939-0995, mpykett@cytomatrix.com.

Standard Advances Parallel Computing

A new standard that allows computers made by different manufacturers to work together in a single network promises to significantly advance the field of parallel computing.

Development of IMPI (Interoperable Message Passing Interface) was spearheaded by NIST with participation by more than a dozen leading companies and research institutes. Demonstrated at an international supercomputing conference in November, the standard should help extend the power of advanced supercomputing to many researchers and organizations that previously have been priced out of the market.

A previous standard, MPI, allowed programmers to coordinate networks of computers to work simultaneously on the complex calculations required for weather forecasting, quantum physics modeling, and a host of other science and engineering applications. However, users typically had to limit such “parallel processing” jobs to machines produced by a single manufacturer.

IMPI allows researchers or engineers from different organizations, with different types of computers, to pool their resources. With IMPI and high-speed Internet connections,
collaborators now can create the equivalent of powerful supercomputers that individual organizations could not have afforded on their own.

To illustrate the power of IMPI, NIST researchers used the standard to perform complex Mandelbrot calculations in real time on eight different computers made by three different manufacturers and located at three different sites. The famous Mandelbrot equation can be
thought of as a mathematician’s paint brush. It creates infinitely varied images based on a set of coordinates in space used as inputs.

Implementation of the IMPI standard rests with computer manufacturers that provide the software needed to translate their machines’ proprietary MPI code into the universally understood IMPI standard. NIST has developed software that allows manufacturers and software vendors to test their products for compliance with IMPI. The test program can be run over the Internet.

A draft of the IMPI standard is available on the World Wide Web at impi.nist.gov/IMPI/.
Contact: Judith Devaney, (301) 975-2882.

Radiology Tools Enhance Care

Expert radiologists in West Virginia can be in several places at the same time—and provide faster, more convenient services to rural patients—as a result of an innovative suite of medical information technologies developed under NIST’s Advanced Technology Program.

The project led to a high-speed network—believed to be the first teleradiology network—used by the Charleston Area Medical Center to offer expert interpretations by a radiologist to at least seven hospitals statewide. Approximately 150 patients are served daily by the system, which handles all types of multimedia data and supports access to existing systems. The network allows health-care providers to get interpretations in 15 minutes, compared to as much as 10 hours previously. “We’re light years ahead of where we were before,” says Bob Boyles, CAMC corporate director for materials services. “The earlier you get a diagnosis, the better success you have with treatment.” CAMC also uses the network to store and make magnetic resonance, computed tomography, ultrasound, nuclear medicine, and X-ray images accessible to staff in intensive care, emergency, and diagnostic imaging.

The three-year ATP project, led by the Advanced Technology Institute of Charleston, S.C., partnered industrial firms, clinical facilities, universities, and national laboratories. Other outcomes included user interfaces and compression technology that have helped reduce the costs and improve the quality of digital radiology. General Electric Co. used some of the technology to develop a commercial picture archiving and communication workstation two years ahead of schedule and assume leadership in this technology, previously dominated by Japan and Europe. A serendipitous outcome of the project, a radiology workflow cost-benefit analysis tool, has been commercialized by GE in its service offerings and will reduce the time and cost involved in process re-ngineering. This work is also expected to improve modeling and simulation in general.

Contact: Jack Corley, Advanced Technology Institute, (843) 760-3792, corley@aticorp.org.

Rijndael Soon May Protect Your Data

An advanced encryption standard (AES) has been proposed to secure the new millennium’s digital communications, beginning with e-government and probably extending to e-commerce. The Rijndael (pronounced Rhine-doll) data encryption formula is the winner of a three-year global competition managed by NIST. It has been proposed to protect sensitive information in federal computer systems and, once approved, likely will be used by many businesses as well. Encryption systems encode everything from e-mail to the personal identification numbers, or PINs, used with bank teller machines.

Researchers from 12 countries participated in the competition. The AES candidates were all sophisticated mathematical formulas called algorithms. Each algorithm was required to support three specific “key” sizes. Like keys for door locks, such keys encode and decode digital messages.

NIST invited the worldwide cryptographic community to “attack” the 15 formulas submitted in an effort to break the codes. The agency and the world cryptographic community also evaluated the formulas. Rijndael was selected because it offered the best combination of security, performance, efficiency, implementability, and flexibility. After a public comment period, NIST will revise the proposed standard—if appropriate—and submit it to the Secretary of Commerce for adoption as an official federal standard. This process is expected to be complete by summer 2001.

Contact: Jim Foti, (301) 975-5237.

New Technique Finds Lost Data

A new microscopy technique could become an important tool for law enforcement and accident investigators seeking to recover or authenticate data from magnetic storage media—audio cassettes, videotapes, credit cards, and computer disks—that may have been damaged accidentally or intentionally modified.

The technique, called second harmonic magnetoresistive microscopy (SH-MRM), uses high-resolution magnetic sensors developed for modern computer hard disk drives. These sensors map the microscopic magnetic fields across tape samples, which store information in very small magnetic tracks. By scanning the sample many times to create an image, investigators can rebuild the original signal (either analog or digital) and gain insight into the recording process and history. The data are acquired and analyzed by computer.

Developed by researchers at NIST and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, SH-MRM indicates the direction and strength of the magnetic field (allowing direct recovery of analog waveforms), has a high dynamic range, and is noninvasive. It represents an improvement over a common tape authentication method (used in criminal trials), which does not indicate the sign of the magnetic field and can cause spurious errors in digital media. SH-MRM is the only way of recovering data from fragile, short (less than 10 cm) pieces of flight data tapes.

The researchers demonstrated the technique by recovering audio data from a tape fragment provided by the National Transportation Safety Board. They also showed that raw digital data can be read from a very short segment of tape from a flight data recorder. For the Federal Bureau of Investigation, they used the technique to reveal magnetic marks produced by the erase and record heads during the recording process. They also showed that the audio tape data from test tracks can be reconstructed and played back directly from the SH-MRM images.

The most significant advantage of the new technique is its scalability and, hence, speed. Large arrays of small sensor elements could read many tracks simultaneously. The researchers are currently developing a multi-element sensor that should be able to scan samples orders of magnitude faster than other forensic analysis and data recovery techniques.

Contact: David Pappas, (303) 497-3374.

New Tools May Cut Construction Costs

More than 5 percent of the labor costs in a typical construction project are spent on activity monitoring. Workers monitor, for example, the state of excavation, the presence of raw materials (e.g., sand and gravel), the status of re-work (fixing things built wrong), and “as-built” information about the project. NIST researchers are developing measurement and automation tools that can reduce this time-consuming and costly burden. By bringing high-speed computer communications, laser technologies, and computer graphics to the task, the researchers intend to provide tools to cut project delivery time and offer a significant competitive edge to both contractors and owners.

NIST researchers are developing standard methods for tracking the movement of
manufactured parts at the construction site. This approach uses three-dimensional laser metrology, wireless communications, interactive web browsers, and a remote time-based project database to provide real-time access to part status updates at both the job site and remote offices. Construction managers will be able to use this technology to determine the current status of their projects and automatically maintain accurate as-built documents.

NIST is developing methods and procedures that would enable the use of a laser scanner, a LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), to determine the status of earth-moving activities. The LIDAR is used to scan a construction site, and the set of 3-D points then is used to generate models for visualization purposes by offsite contractors, engineers, and designers. The eventual goal is to use a LIDAR to obtain precise, timely cut and fill requirements, as well as quantities of material placed or removed and rates of material removal, all of which are of significant interest to contractors, subcontractors, and owners. The photo shows a computer-generated model, based on data obtained from a LIDAR, of a sand pile after a scoop of sand has been removed by a front-end loader. The amount of sand left in the pile, and the billable amount removed by the subcontractor, are calculated by computer.

NIST also is developing interoperability protocols and data standards, appropriate for mobile or wireless equipment. Such advances will facilitate “plug-and-play” compatibility among sensors, field computers, construction machines, and databases—keys to automation. NIST’s advanced construction initiatives have drawn industry interest; collaborative research projects with U.S. construction companies are planned for 2001.

Contact: Geraldine Cheok, (301) 975-6074.

Going Fishing in the Desert

Fish farms have sometimes been criticized for their heavy use—and fouling—of water. Kent SeaTech (San Diego, Calif.), which runs an innovative aquaculture operation in the California desert, wanted to change that. Working with partial support from NIST’s Advanced Technology Program, the company developed a comprehensive waste-water treatment and recirculation system that reuses 80 percent of its water. The system uses a combination of a fish—tilapia—that thrives on uneaten food from striped bass culture tanks, to reduce the amount of solids in the water; a bacteria-based “reactor” to convert ammonia to nitrates; and a bulrush-laden artificial wetland, which converts the nitrates to nitrogen, controls pH, and removes carbon dioxide. Not only has the technology helped Kent SeaTech increase its production of striped bass, but the company now sells the (quite tasty) tilapia to Asian markets at nearly 100 percent profit. The system costs only a fifth as much as conventional sewage treatment, the company says. Moreover, it can provide neighboring vegetable farms with lower cost water with moderate levels of useful plant nutrients. Contact: Mike Massingill, (858) 452-5765.

Flushing with Success in Montana

Catching Computer Crooks with a ... Library

Hats Off to NIST Wind Tunnels

From Innovation to Market—NIST’s Advanced Technology Program shares with industry the cost of developing innovative, high-risk technologies that have the potential to pay off big for the nation in terms of new products, industrial capabilities, jobs, and quality of life. But the ATP does not fund product development, marketing, and sales. To help small companies and start-ups commercialize and launch products developed with ATP co-funding, a new report is available. Commercialization and Business Planning Guide for the Post-Award Period (NIST CGR 99-779) offers detailed information and advice on financing options, how venture capitalists and “angels” work, licensing agreements, and corporate partnering. Copies of the guide are available from the ATP, (301) 975-4332.

A Safer Night’s Sleep—NIST has developed a technique for testing the threat to a mattress from burning bed coverings such as sheets, blankets, and comforters. The testing advance completes the first phase of a program, supported by the Sleep Products Safety Council, aimed at reducing hazards associated with the open-flame ignition of residential mattresses. All mattresses sold in the United States since 1973 already are resistant to ignition by cigarettes. A single copy of the report on this research, Flammability Assessment Methodology for Mattresses (NISTIR 6497), is available from NIST Public Inquiries by fax at (301) 926-1630 or electronic mail at inquiries@nist.gov.

Improving Air Quality—NIST has joined an interagency effort led by the Environmental Protection Agency—the National Particulate Matter Research Program—aimed at improving the nation’s air quality and public health. Particulate matter is a mix of coarse and fine particles in the air produced by natural processes as well as human activities. About 10 to 100 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, fine particulate matter can consist of dust, ashes, soot, and sulfate aerosols. NIST will develop and provide the fundamental chemical measurements and standard reference materials that will serve as the basis for improved monitoring of air quality by government and industry. For more information about NIST’s particulate matter research, contact Mike Verkouteren, (301) 975-3933.

About Technology at a Glance:

NIST is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce's Technology Administration. NIST promotes US economic growth by working with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements, and standards. Technology at a Glance is produced by Public and Business Affairs, NIST, 100 Bureau Dr., Stop 3460, Gaithersburg, Md. 20899-3460. Any mention of commercial products is for information only; it does not imply recommendation or endorsement by NIST. Technology at a Glance Editor: Gail Porter, (301) 975-3392, email: gail.porter@nist.gov. For patent information, call (301) 975-3084.

Technology at a Glance Archive Files

Last updated: 12/14/2000
Susan Ford