The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded a five-year, up to $20 million grant to establish a Forensic Science Center of Excellence. Based at Iowa State University, it will include researchers from Carnegie Mellon University; the University of California, Irvine; and the University of Virginia.

What do you know? There is now a world standard for capturing and conveying the knowledge that robots possess—or, to get philosophical about it, an ontology for automatons.

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) is one of the most sensitive and informative surface analysis techniques available. However, XPS requires a high vacuum to operate, which makes analyzing materials in liquid and gaseous environments difficult.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued for public review and comment a draft report summarizing 65 challenges that cloud computing poses to forensics investigators who uncover, gather, examine and interpret digital evidence to help solve crimes.

Particles of soot floating through the air and comets hurtling through space have at least one thing in common: 0.36. That, reports a research group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is the measure of how dense they will get under normal conditions, and it’s a value that seems to be constant for similar aggregates across an impressively wide size range from nanometers to tens of meters.*

This gift from science just keeps on giving. Measurements taken at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) show why a material already known to be good at separating components of natural gas also can do something trickier: help convert one chemical to another, a process called catalysis. The discovery is a rare example of a laboratory-made material easily performing a task that biology usually requires a complex series of steps to accomplish.

JILA physicists used an ultrafast laser and help from German theorists to discover a new semiconductor quasiparticle—a handful of smaller particles that briefly condense into a liquid-like droplet.