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Material Measurement Laboratory

News and Updates

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NIST Corrosion Lab Tests Suggest Need for Underground Gas Tank Retrofits

July 29, 2014

A hidden hazard may lurk beneath many of the roughly 156,000 gas stations across the United States. The hazard is corrosion in parts of underground gas storage...

Latest NIST Mass Spectral Library: Expanded Coverage, Features

July 29, 2014

The world's most widely used and trusted resource for identifying mass spectra, the "fingerprints" of molecules, has undergone a major expansion, according to...

Enhanced NIST Instrument Enables High-speed Chemical Imaging of Tissues

July 22, 2014

A research team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), working with the Cleveland Clinic, has demonstrated a dramatically improved...

Researchers Find Organic Pollutants Not Factor in Turtle Tumor Disease

July 15, 2014

For nearly four decades, scientists have suspected that persistent organic pollutants (POPs) contributed to a green turtle's susceptibility to the virus that...

Immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibody molecule with glycan attached. Inset shows glycan structure.

New NIST Web Tool Makes Working with Glycan Sugars a Lot Sweeter

July 11, 2014

When researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) need a special tool to do their work more effectively, they often prove that...

Call for Comments: A Strategic Plan for the Materials Genome Initiative

June 27, 2014

The federal government is looking for public comment on a draft strategic plan for the Obama administration's Materials Genome Initiative (MGI). The draft 2014...

Shown here are the tools for testing arson samples using NIST's new PLOT capillary method.

NIST Analytic Technique Offers Arson Investigators Faster, More Accurate Results

June 17, 2014

A research group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has demonstrated a new method for detecting ignitable liquids that could change...

High school student Jessica Young checking the packing density of random aggregates of plastic spheres in a cylinder.

Snowballs to Soot: The Clumping Density of Many Things Seems to Be a Standard

June 10, 2014

Particles of soot floating through the air and comets hurtling through space have at least one thing in common: 0.36. That, reports a research group at the...

Lithium Sulfur: A Battery Revolution on the Cheap?

June 3, 2014

Whip together an industrial waste product and a bit of plastic and you might have the recipe for the next revolution in battery technology. Scientists from the...

$Acrylic fracture image$

Better Materials for Safer Sports: Time to Use Our Heads

May 30, 2014

On May 29, 2014, at the White House Healthy Kids and Safe Sports Concussion Summit, President Obama highlighted both the need for greater national awareness of...

Capillary Device Significantly Improves Manufacture of Quality Liposomes

May 20, 2014

When the English author Sir Francis Bacon wrote "The world's a bubble" in 1629, it's a safe bet he wasn't thinking about microfluidics. However, for a research...

NIST's Simple Microfluidic Devices Now Have Valves

April 2, 2014

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have added yet another innovation—miniature valves—to their ever-growing collection of...

Purified DNA fluorescing orange under ultraviolet light.

How Well Did You Sequence that Genome?

February 25, 2014

In December 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first high-throughput DNA sequencer (also known commonly as a "gene sequencer"), an...

Sample Deposit on Piezoelectric Quartz Crystals

NIST Microanalysis Technique Makes the Most of Small Nanoparticle Samples

February 24, 2014

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have demonstrated that they can make...

NMR data showing the levels of reduced glutathione (GSH) and oxidized glutathione (GSSG) over time in yeast cells at rest (top) and under oxidative stress (bottom).

New NIST Method Evaluates Response to Oxidation in Live Cells

February 11, 2014

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new method for accurately measuring a key process governing a wide...

Images of the same basic cell type grown on two different bioscaffolds

Shape-Sifting: NIST Categorizes Bio Scaffolds by Characteristic Cell Shapes

February 7, 2014

Getting in the right shape might be just as important in a biology lab as a gym. Shape is thought to play an important role in the effectiveness of cells grown...

Scanning electron micrograph of Gardnerella vaginalis bacteria

NIST Cell Membrane Model Studied as Future Diagnostic Tool

January 29, 2014

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and in Lithuania have used a NIST-developed laboratory model of a simplified cell...

MML Researcher R. Joseph Kline Receives Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

January 15, 2014

Material Measurement Laboratory researcher R. Joseph Kline was recently named among the 102 recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists...

NIST Analysis Helps the U.S. Chemical Safety Board Pinpoint Root Cause of Pressure Vessel Failure

January 7, 2014

In 2009, a violent rupture of a 50-foot pressure vessel used to produce synthetic crystals at the NDK Crystal facility in Belvidere, Illinois fatally injured a...

A New NIST Online Database: The NIST Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Structure Index

January 6, 2014

Recently, a new website containing a wealth of information on polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) was made publicly available by NIST. PAHs are compounds...

New NIST Tests Explore Safety of Nanotubes in Modern Plastics Over Time

December 17, 2013

Who cares about old plastic? Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) do, so that you won't have to years down the road, when...

NIST Announces New Center for Materials Research to Advance Manufacturing and Innovation

December 3, 2013

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced today that it has selected a consortium led by Northwestern University to establish a new...

$25 Million NIST Award Represents Major Milestone for the Materials Genome Initiative

December 3, 2013

Officials at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced today an award of $25 million over five years to a Chicago-based consortium...

Three NIST scientists standing in front of the OCPW building

NIST Scientists Contribute to Nobel Peace Prize Winning Efforts on Chemical Weapons Detection

November 5, 2013

Innovative chemical weapons detection technologies developed by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have played a key role...

Allan Harvey Elected ASME Fellow

October 22, 2013

Allan Harvey, a chemical engineer in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Material Measurement Laboratory, has been elected as a fellow of...

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