An official website of the United States government
Here’s how you know
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock (
) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.
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
By marrying state-of-the-art nanometer-scale gratings with a Space Age-era thin-film polymer, researchers working at the National Institute of Standards and
Welding has been around, in some form, for centuries. Today it enables a large percentage of the U.S. economy,* thanks to its role in the creation of a diverse
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has accurately measured parts designed for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, the long-awaited
Let's say you're a biotechnologist working to develop new medicines or a better test for forensic analysis. You might find yourself frequently using absorbance
Physicists in NIST's Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML) have been working on a new class of chip-based photonic thermometers that measure temperature with
When a long-awaited quantum information network finally arrives, in whatever form, it will incorporate two essential technologies: a method of generating and
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is featured in several of the news media's lists of the top science stories of 2015. NIST's change at
NIST has been issued a patent for a novel method to improve the performance and utility of the sort of high-intensity discharge (HID) lamps used for stadium and
Detecting individual particles of light just got a bit more precise—by 74 picoseconds to be exact—thanks to advances in materials by National Institute of
A collaboration between NIST researchers and a private-sector firm has led to development of a commercial device to fill a critical need in industry: field
Everyone expects objects at the atomic scale to follow the weird rules of quantum mechanics. But in the past few years, scientists at NIST and elsewhere have
Researchers working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a novel way to noninvasively measure and map how and where
BOULDER, Colo.–Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have added to their collection of ingredients for future quantum
As recently as a few months ago, somebody who needed an internationally recognized calibration for a flow meter that operates with very low-temperature fluids
NIST scientists, with collaborators at the University of Michigan, have designed and demonstrated a new and easily tunable, high-contrast scattering agent for
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers are seeing the light, but in an altogether different way. And how they are doing it just might
Following decades of research and development, commercial products enabled by nanoparticles are poised to have broad impact in diverse sectors of the global
Society is increasingly concerned about exactly how much carbon dioxide and other pollutants are coming out of smokestacks. But current measurements are clouded
How, precisely, does disease begin and progress in a single cell? To fully understand such processes on the smallest scales, scientists need a way to peer deep
Neutrons, the charge-less constituents of atomic nuclei, are nifty imagers. Since the 1950s, scientists have been using these particles' eerie ability to non
This graphic describes how researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) used pairs of light particles to perform a "Bell test,"
BOULDER, Colo.—Einstein was wrong about at least one thing: There are, in fact, "spooky actions at a distance," as now proven by researchers at the National
Physicists at JILA have made their "quantum crystal" of ultracold molecules more valuable than ever by packing about five times more molecules into it. The
You've probably seen it on TV: To determine whether a single weapon was used in multiple crimes, forensics labs run images of a spent bullet through a database