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Inside every cellphone lies a tiny mechanical heart, beating several billion times a second. These micromechanical resonators play an essential role in...
Sneezes, rain clouds, and ink jet printers: They all produce or contain liquid droplets so tiny it would take several billion of them to fill a liter bottle...
A passion undeterred — guest researcher (and former postdoc) Nandita Abhyankar took a detour between her graduate studies and current scientific endeavors, but...
The natural, or resonance, frequency at which a simple harmonic oscillator vibrates reveals with exquisite sensitivity the essential properties of the physical...
Conventional microscopes provide essential information about samples in two dimensions — the plane of the microscope slide. But flat is not all that. In many...
Researchers have spent more than three decades developing and studying miniature biosensors that can identify single molecules. In five to 10 years, when such...
Electron or X-Ray Beam Lithography in Liquids Description These days, the fabrication of 2D and 3D structures out of liquid, biocompatible, hydrogel solutions...
You’re going at the speed limit down a two-lane road when a car barrels out of a driveway on your right. You slam on the brakes, and within a fraction of a...
In a technique known as DNA origami, researchers fold long strands of DNA over and over again to construct a variety of tiny 3D structures, including miniature...
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a device to detect a quantum property of electrons, known as spin, in...
As computer chips and other electronic devices continue to shrink in size, they become ever more sensitive to contamination. However, detecting the nanoscale...
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland have developed a microchip technology that can convert...
Some assembly required — NIST postdoctoral researcher Jacob Majikes takes the smallest fragments of life and combines them into new structures ... or rather...
By shining white light on a glass slide stippled with millions of tiny titanium dioxide pillars, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and...
DNA is not only the blueprint of life; it has become the backbone for making tiny structures that can be inserted into the human body to diagnose and treat...
Just as a meter stick with hundreds of tick marks can be used to measure distances with great precision, a device known as a laser frequency comb, with its...
A tooth? An angel? A strong man? Instead of seeing patterns in clouds, our scientists go to the microscope! NIST’s Ravi Attota uses a simple optical microscope...
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have developed an optical switch that routes light from one...
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed an optical system that accurately measures the flow of extraordinarily...
A prime suspect in the onset of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases is a normally benign enzyme that is essential to proper development of the nervous system...
As if they were bubbles expanding in a just-opened bottle of champagne, tiny circular regions of magnetism can be rapidly enlarged to provide a precise method...
Imagine being able to shape a pulse of light in any conceivable manner—compressing it, stretching it, splitting it in two, changing its intensity or altering...
Just as a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step, the deformations and fractures that cause catastrophic failure in materials begin with a few...
Some of the most advanced communication systems now under development rely on the properties of quantum science to store and transport information. However...
By using light waves instead of electric current to transmit data, photonic chips—circuits for light—have advanced fundamental research in many areas from...