NIST

Although it might sound like an oxymoron, the newly unveiled SCUBA-2 camera housed at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, is the world’s largest submillimeter camera. Submillimeter refers not to the physical size of the new camera itself, but to the submillimeter waveband between the far-infrared and microwave wavebands that the telescope observes. Being far more sensitive and powerful than its predecessor, SCUBA-2 will be able to map areas of the sky faster than ever before and provide information about the early life of stars, planets and galaxies. Read More

With sizes typically measured in micrometers, Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) devices are already being used in applications such as super-accurate sensors, energy-harvesting devices, and electronic signal amplifiers. Given how difficult it would be to replace such systems' moving parts as they wear out, it would be ideal if those parts could be made from as hard a material as possible. Well, while most MEMS are presently made chiefly of silicon, researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are now on their way to making them from diamonds. Read More

Thousands of people were left homeless this May, when over 40 percent of the town of Slave Lake, Alberta, Canada was destroyed by a wildfire that started in the adjacent forest. This is just one example of the devastation that can result when fires occur in what is known as the wildland-urban interface. While some buildings are destroyed when the wildfire itself reaches them, others can catch fire due to wind-borne embers from that fire. In an effort to test how well wooden decks are able to resist such embers, America's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) created something known as the Dragon - it's a device that sucks in tree mulch, and "breathes" it out as firebrands. Read More

Despite all the breakthroughs in the world of robotics, we still seem to be some way off the kind of advanced robots that can autonomously carry out a variety of tasks in unstructured and cluttered environments. One of the key bottlenecks holding back the development of such next-generation robots is how robots perceive the data gathered from their various sensors. Willow Garage, the Californian robotics company behind the PR2 open platform robot, has teamed up with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to launch an international “perception challenge” with the goal of encouraging improvements to sensing and perception technologies for next-generation robots. Read More

It’s one of those things where if you think about it too much, your head might explode... we know there are 1,000 grams in a kilogram, and 1,000 kilograms in a metric ton, but how was it ever decided what any of these units actually physically weighed? Well... the modern metric system is part of the Système International d'Unités (International System of Units) or SI. It states that a kilogram is the weight of one specific 130 year-old platinum-iridium cylinder, which is kept in a vault at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France... and no, don’t ask how they knew if they’d got its weight right, when they were making it. The problem is, that cylinder’s mass changes slightly over time. Now, a worldwide effort is under way to change the definitive weight of a kilogram to something more permanent. Read More

Six years ago, America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed miniature sensors that each utilized about 100 billion rubidium atoms in gas form, a low-power infrared laser and optics to detect tiny magnetic fields. Until recently the sensors had been used almost exclusively for physics research, but now NIST has teamed up with the National Metrology Institute of Germany to successfully use one of the mini-sensors to track a human heartbeat – an accomplishment which could have medical applications down the road. Read More

If you had to sort a bunch of nanoparticles by size, what would you use? A microscope, tweezers, and a very finely-calibrated caliper? Actually, you’d probably use the nanofluidic “multi-tool” created by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US. Before you start picturing a teeny-tiny Leatherman, which would admittedly be pretty cool, you should be aware that the NIST device is more like a coin separator, that sorts your nickels, dimes and quarters. In this case, however, they would be nickels, dimes and quarters that are smaller than a bacterium. Read More

You probably don't go hunting for decaying bodies too often, but then you probably don’t work in the field of forensics. If you did, then you’d be glad to hear that technology recently developed by America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) should make finding buried bodies much easier. Traditionally, cadaver-sniffing dogs have been used to find bodies, but they can be limited in situations such as where a body is buried under concrete. The new device, however, uses a probe slightly thicker than a human hair to probe the soil, detecting ninhydrin-reactive nitrogen (NRN) that collects in air pockets around gravesoil. Previous technology could only achieve that same end through what NIST describes as “the tedious and expensive process” of solvent extraction of soil samples. Read More

OK, you’re right, it 's impossible to actually beam “nothing” across a room. It is, however, possible to beam light across a room, sending information in the form of extremely short dips in that light. That’s what America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been doing with its dark pulse laser. Whereas regular lasers transmit information by using darkness as a zero point and light pulses as data, this one uses light as a zero point, with darkness as the data. Read More