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News and Updates

Displaying 351 - 375 of 689

Counting Down to the New Ampere

After it's all over, your lights will be just as bright, and your refrigerator just as cold. But very soon the ampere -- the SI base unit of electrical current

Measuring Tiny Forces with Light

Photons are bizarre: They have no mass, but they do have momentum. And that allows researchers to do counterintuitive things with photons, such as using light

Detecting Brain Waves with Atomic Vapor

It's really hard to hear what the brain is saying. Neural impulses -- currents of ions moving through channels between the brain's 100 billion neurons at a

SF6 Shows Promise as Mercury Substitute

Elemental mercury – which is being phased out of commercial thermometers worldwide due to safety concerns – may also be replaced as a temperature reference

Quantum Spin Squeezing Gets Real

Today's atomic clocks are ridiculously accurate. The best of them tell time so well that if they had been running since the Big Bang, by now they would not have

Better Accuracy Out of Thin (or Thick) Air

NIST scientists have devised and improved a prototype instrument the size of a loaf of bread that can substantially increase the accuracy of length measurements

Shedding Light on Dark Matter with SQUIDs

Perhaps fortunately, most folks haven't noticed that 85% of the Milky Way is missing: The kind of familiar, ordinary matter we know – made up of protons
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