MrPyrometer (MrPyro)

As the power of AI grows, businesses, governments and the public will have to manage AI’s impact on society.Source: Taking Measure – A NIST Blog…

As we approach the end of 2022, we wanted to share with our readers a NISTified version of a classic seasonal song about a topic that is near and dear to our scientists year-round: the wonders of the metric system.Source: Taking Measure – A NIST Blog…

A NIST researcher shares his excitement about the promise of a hybrid molecule that can detect disease. Source: Taking Measure – A NIST Blog…

My Background in Disasters It seems as though I was born to be a disaster researcher. I can vividly remember seeking shelter during tornado warnings in the basement at friends’ or relatives’ houses, or in the church at the end of our street as a young child living in Wichita, Kansas. When I was 9 years old, my family moved to Hawaii when my stepdad, an Army officer, was stationed there. While we lived there, my dad’s house back in Oklahoma…

Radiation expert and historian Bert Coursey, who has worked at NIST for 50 years, writes extensively on the history of radium and radiation standards. He recently reviewed NIST’s connection with the radium dial workers — notably the role of one heroic woman — in the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Below is a condensed version of the full story that you can read here. Beginning in the 1910s and continuing through the 1920s, more than…

Climate change keeps NIST economist Jennifer Helgeson up at night. Not with worry, but with work. For the last several weeks, Helgeson was working on the latest report from the IPCC. Source: Taking Measure – A NIST Blog…

On April 13, 1975, in the community of Wheaton, Maryland, a lone shooter allegedly targeting Black people wounded five and took the lives of two others over the course of 30 minutes before he was killed by police. The two slain victims, Connie Stanley and John Sligh Jr., were both chemists at NIST (known at the time as the National Bureau of Standards). News reports indicated that they might have known each other through their work. But they were in separate…

Fires that begin on upholstered furniture such as sofas are the leading cause of home fire fatalities in the United States, accounting for about 600 deaths per year. They are not as frequent as cooking fires, but they are about 14 times more likely to result in death than other home fires. Since my days as a graduate student, I have devoted my research life to the cutting-edge science that can help reduce these fires and make our homes safer. I…

As a happily retired materials scientist from NIST, I have continued a long-standing interest in how materials deform and fracture under high stress. My research began in the 1960s with fundamental investigations into the way intrinsically brittle solids can sustain highly concentrated stresses beneath hard contacts. (An everyday example of such a contact is a round pellet fired from a BB gun at a windowpane.) Later, my focus turned to studying materials in a broad range of small-scale technological applications, such…

For nine years, I have been obsessed with the Rubik’s Cube. It is a puzzle that has simultaneously stumped and interested the whole world since it was first invented, something few other puzzles can claim. However, while most people are satisfied after solving the cube once, I wasn’t. I wanted to understand what I did, not just read it from a book. So I went to the internet and started down the rabbit hole. I learned new methods and algorithms. I…