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What drives cells to live and engines to move? It all comes down to a quantity that scientists call “free energy,” essentially the energy that can be extracted...
By comparing different types of remote atomic clocks, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have performed the most accurate...
NIST’s Michael Gaitan and his colleagues patented a new type of acceleration sensor in the late 1990s. Known as the “convective accelerometer,” it uses heated...
Over the last two decades, scientists have discovered that the optical microscope can be used to detect, track and image objects much smaller than their...
After years of research, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed and demonstrated a way to count the absolute...
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researcher Allen R. Hefner, Jr., has been named a finalist for the 2018 Samuel J. Heyman Service to...
Nobody really knows what plant roots are doing when they’re at home. Digging up a plant exposes the roots, but destroys the soil’s natural fabric. Information...
In an advance that could shrink many measurement technologies, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and partners have...
When the universe was very young – about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang – it underwent a sudden explosive expansion...
Trapping light with an optical version of a whispering gallery, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a...
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a method for generating numbers guaranteed to be random by quantum...
NIST researchers have pioneered a process that drastically simplifies fabrication of the kind of nanoscale microchip features that may soon form the basis of a...
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a chip on which laser light interacts with a tiny cloud of atoms to serve...
Imagine a single particle, only one-tenth the diameter of a bacterium, whose miniscule jiggles induce sustained vibrations in an entire mechanical device some...
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is now providing a new measurement service that can improve the quality of magnetic resonance imaging...
Accurately detecting, locating and quantifying leaks of methane, the main component of natural gas and a major fuel source worldwide, is critically important...
The Pilot Study — read 2016 article details — was completed in late 2016 and the Final Report was published on the BIPM website in June of 2017. The main...
February 17, 2018 marked the culmination of ten years of planning and construction for NIST’s NSLS-II Spectroscopy Beamline Suite, with first light at the Soft...
You can’t see well without lenses that can focus, whether those lenses are in your eye or the microscope you peer through. An innovative new way to focus beams...
JILA scientists have invented a new imaging technique that produces rapid, precise measurements of quantum behavior in an atomic clock in the form of near...
This month, two seminal documents in American history—the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution— went on display at the...
The National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) is home to one of the most sensitive machines in the world for measuring objects’ dimensions...
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built a superconducting switch that “learns” like a biological system and could...
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has filed a provisional patent application for a microflow measurement system, about the size of a...
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated that quantum physics might enable communications and mapping in...