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Justyna Zwolak poses for a casual photo outdoors on the NIST campus.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie: A Legacy of Innovation and Empowerment for Women in Science

February 12, 2025

Growing up in a country where the first scientist to win a Nobel Prize was a woman helped inspire a NIST researcher to pursue her career in science.

A rectangular box coated with reflective foil hangs from cables over a parking lot.

High-Flying Science: How and Why We Sent a Refrigerator Halfway to Space

January 23, 2025

Ephraim Gau

NIST-developed tools can study the remnants of the Big Bang and more, and now researchers are working to launch these tools high above the Earth’s atmosphere — in a scientific refrigerator.

Historical photo shows Henry Moseley sitting at a desk reading a thick book, with other open books on the desk.

Henry Moseley: A Patriotic Scientist Who Changed the Periodic Table — and Then Went Off to War

January 18, 2024

Miral Dizdaroglu

At a young age, physicist Henry Moseley changed the periodic table of the elements — before dying in a bloody World War I battle.

Denis Bergeron working behind an L-shield with a syringe containing a radiopharmaceutical.

NIST Radioactivity Measurements Get the Ball Rolling for New Cancer Therapies

February 16, 2021

Denis Bergeron

From the earliest days of radioactivity research, radiation and cancer therapy have gone together like peas and carrots. But Zach Levine covered peas and carrots in an earlier blog post, so I will focus on radiation and cancer therapy. Shortly after Wilhelm Röntgen discovered the high-energy

black background with many multicolored symbols representing a clipboard, a computer screen, test tubes, gears and a petri dish. On the computer screen it reads "World Metrology Day 2020"

World Metrology Day: Measurements for Medicine

May 19, 2020

Walter Copan

Today is World Metrology Day. Have you put up the decorations and baked a cake yet to celebrate?! You should! Metrology, the science of measurement, makes modern life possible. Measurement science provides the common language that enables manufacturing quality, equitable global trade and the

Charlie Tarrio peers into a large chamber illuminated by purple light.

How Extreme Ultraviolet Light Helps Give Us Smarter Smartphones and Stronger Satellites

April 13, 2020

Charles Tarrio, Thomas Lucatorto

In 2019, after decades of effort, manufacturers used a new technology to create smartphones with individual circuit features as small as 7 nanometers (nm), or billionths of a meter, enabling them to cram 8.5 billion electronic devices known as transistors on a single small chip. Fitting more

a photo of two bottles about the size of spice bottles. On one is written 4351 Human lung for 239+240 Pu measurements, and on the other is written 4352 Human liver for 239+240 Pu measurements

Making Radioactive Lung and Liver Samples for Better Human Health

October 25, 2019

Kenneth G.W. Inn

It was 1978, and the United States was embroiled in a Cold War. Nuclear weapons were being produced and numerous countries were carrying out atmospheric nuclear tests. Nuclear power plants were also being built and fueled. As an unintended result, people were sometimes contaminated and injured when

Woman standing in a lab holds a rectangular radiation detector near a metal globe that has been painted with a radiation symbol

Defending Against Nuclear and Radioactive Threats: A Q&A with NIST's Leticia Pibida

May 8, 2019

Leticia Pibida

Leticia Pibida, a physicist in the Radiation Physics Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), has been chosen as a finalist for a Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal, an award for federal employees given by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. The honor

It’s All Right to Be Wrong in Science

January 29, 2018

Paulina Kuo

I am a scientist. I am often wrong, and that’s okay. You may have heard about major errors in science and engineering that made the news headlines, like the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, aka “ Galloping Gertie,” or the 1999 crash of the Mars Climate Orbiter. Or maybe you’ve seen the recent

Steel casement containing Curie's last radium standard

Saving Marie Curie’s Last Radium Standard

February 22, 2017

Bert Coursey

Marie Curie is perhaps the most famous woman of 20th-century science. Major motion pictures and best-selling biographies have chronicled her discovery of the radioactive elements polonium and radium, for which she shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903 and then received a second Nobel Prize, this

Taking Measure Blog Posts

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