Feature Stories

How fast is that plant pulling CO₂ out of the atmosphere? You may soon be able to point a sensor at it to find out.

The government has acronyms for seemingly everything. At NIST, one even has a registered trademark: SRM® is the “brand name” of our certified reference materials, the generic term for these vital tools. 

The new National Fire Research Laboratory aims to make buildings better and safer. The expanded facility can hold structures up to two stories tall and contain fires up to 20 megawatts of peak energy—that’s equivalent to a small home engulfed by fire!

In the gangster era of Prohibition and the Great Depression, a physicist at the National Bureau of Standards, now NIST, brought modern ideas to the then-emerging field of forensic science.

Every year, hundreds of U.S. communities take a beating. These are the towns, cities, counties and tribal areas that suffer the casualties, damage and disruptions inflicted by hazards. 

Quick, think of a four-letter name beginning with “N” for a federal agency involved in space science.

The growing number of visitors with mechanical escorts traveling to the newest building on the Gaithersburg, Md., campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) come expecting a disaster.

Until now, stress testing has largely been limited to stretching or squeezing samples in one direction, yielding an incomplete picture. At NCAL, materials undergo the material-engineering equivalent of a thorough medical exam and results are shared with partners.