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News and Updates

Displaying 51 - 75 of 142

How Bright is the Moon, Really?

The “inconstant moon,” as Shakespeare called it in Romeo and Juliet, is more reliable than his pair of star-crossed lovers might have thought. Now researchers

Driving the Universal Quantum Bus

NIST scientists have achieved a world record in detecting the intensity of an ultra-faint source of light, equaling the capabilities of the deep-space

Measuring Acceleration with Light

Most people have never seen an accelerometer -- a device that measures change in velocity -- and wouldn’t know where to look. Yet accelerometers have become

A Standard for Lighting Color Preference?

One of the goals of artificial lighting is to make things look natural. White light can make an otherwise appetizing sandwich look like garbage, if the reds

NIST Neutral as Butter War Spreads

In 1917, NIST physicists Irwin Priest and Chauncey Peters were drawn into the so-called Butter War, an early 20 th century commercial and political spat between

Calculating Color

Harry Keegan of NIST’s Photometry & Colorimetry Division using a mechanical calculator in 1958 to compute color coordinates for standard sources.