|
© Geoffrey
Wheeler
NIST
Physicist Deborah Jin in her laboratory at JILA.
For
a high resolution copy of this photo contact, Gail
Porter. |
NIST
Physicist Wins MacArthur 'Genius' Grant
Deborah
Jin, 34, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colo., and adjoint assistant
professor of physics at the University of Colorado
at Boulder (CU-Boulder), has
been named a 2003 winner of a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship,
commonly known as the “genius grant.” The fellowship
is awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
of Chicago.
Jin
is a fellow of JILA, a laboratory run by NIST and CU-Boulder.
The
MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships
to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality
and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked
capacity for self-direction. The fellowship is a “no
strings attached” award
in support of people, not projects. Each fellowship comes
with a stipend of $500,000 to the recipient, paid out in
equal quarterly
installments over five years.
“NIST congratulates Deborah Jin for receiving this tremendous
honor,” commented NIST Director Arden Bement Jr. “The
MacArthur Fellowship goes to persons of unlimited creativity
and originality, unwavering dedication to the pursuit
of excellence, and unending commitment to the betterment
of
others. Deborah
exemplifies all of these characteristics and more.”
In
1999, Jin and graduate student Brian DeMarco created
a new quantum gas that was named one of the top 10 scientific
advances
of the year by the journal Science. They
cooled a vapor of
quantum particles to a temperature less than a millionth
of a degree above absolute zero using lasers and
magnetic traps.
The result was a quantum state in which atoms behave
like waves. Jin and DeMarco's research is a step
toward a better
understanding
of fermions—basic building blocks of matter—and
may lead toward a new generation of atomic clocks
and atom lasers. (For more details go to www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/jin.htm.)
Media
Contact:
Michael
E. Newman, (301) 975-3025
Helping
Consumers Choose Among House Repair Options
House
maintenance is a never-ending and costly task. Roofing, siding,
windows and even garage doors wear out.
Now
researchers at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST)
have developed a software program that takes
the guesswork out of replacement decisions. The free program,
called NEST (for National Economic Service-life Tools), allows
homeowners to select the most cost-effective replacement
material for roofing, siding, windows and garage doors.
It also provides,
for the user’s own zip code, cost estimates for replacements,
including the cost of local labor and local materials, as
well as the cost of maintenance.
NEST
currently consists of two software tools. “NEST
Builder” and “Durability Doctor.” NEST Builder
asks homeowners to specify the house layout and size, as well
as various kinds of materials used for roofing, siding, windows
and garage doors. The software program uses the information
to build a virtual or graphic model of a user’s home.
“Durability
Doctor” then combines the house model data with
information on material cost and service life of the selected
housing component. It estimates the installation and maintenance
cost as well as the monthly financing cost of each alternative
over the product's lifetime. Consumers then can compare
costs for nine different
types of roofing, four garage door materials, six types
of windows and eight varieties of siding. “Durability
Doctor” also
reports which replacements are the most durable, have the
lowest installation cost and lowest life-cycle cost for
each housing
component.
NIST
developed NEST with funds from the Partnership for Advancing
Technology in Housing, a government-industry
initiative led
by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to
modernize the homebuilding industry. NEST is available
at www.pathnet.org/sp.asp?mc=tools_nest.
Mimicking
the Human Body With Carbon Black Polymers
Metal
detectors have become so commonplace that you might think we
know all we need to about them. However, the law enforcement
community must continually update performance standards for
metal detectors to ensure that new products purchased in the
marketplace operate at specified minimum levels. Further-more,
they must know if exposure to the magnetic fields generated
by metal detectors affects the functioning of personal medical
electronic devices (such as cardiac defibrillators, infusion
pumps, spinal cord stimulators, etc.)
With
funding from the U.S. Department of Justice’s National
Institute of Justice, researchers at the National Institute
of Standards and Technology (NIST) develop and revise such
standards
as new technologies become available. One project concentrated
on finding better materials to mimic the human body’s
response to the magnetic fields generated by metal detectors.
By using
such biologic “phantoms,” researchers can create
more realistic testing scenarios without subjecting medical
patients to exposure.
Since
about two-thirds of the human body is made of water,
conventional phantoms utilize liquids and salts. However,
the liquids are
subject to evaporation that changes both the salinity and
the electrical conductivity, making it difficult to model human
body components consistently.
The
NIST researchers came up with an improved phantom material,
a polymer mixed with carbon
powder. By varying the amount
of carbon powder used, the materials can mimic blood, bone,
fat
and skin. The researchers chose carbon black—a fine
powder made almost entirely of elemental carbon—because
of its electrical conductivity and low cost. The impregnated
polymers
can be formed in a variety of shapes and sizes. A recent
NIST publication* discusses the material and its low-frequency
electrical
properties in detail.
Media
Contact:
Gail Porter, (301) 975-3392
*
NIST Technical Note 1529, Carbon-Loaded Polymer Composites
Used as Human Phantoms: Theoretical Models for Predicting
Low-Frequency Dielectric Behavior. R.G. Geyer, J. Baker-Jarvis, M.D.
Janezic, and R.K. Kaiser.
|
Columns
of a DNA gel show the sizes of Y chromosome fragments from
6 male and 1 female sample (empty lane third from right).
For
a high resolution copy of this image contact, Gail
Porter. |
Standard
Improves Tests of Male DNA
Mother
Goose tells us that boys are made of “snips and snails
and puppy dog tails.” She was clearly mis-informed
about the snails and tails, but she was on to something with
the snips. What you really need to build a boy is a “Y” chromosome,
and it turns out that SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms),
known by the biotech cognoscente as simply “snips,” can
be helpful in sorting out who fathered the boy. If DNA can
be thought of as an instruction book for building a specific person,
then SNPs are single letters at an exact location in that
book that tend to vary among individuals.
A
new Standard Reference Material (SRM) issued by the National
Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST) uses both SNPs and
STRs (sections where three to five DNA “letters” form
repeating patterns) to help improve the reliability of laboratory
analyses of male DNA. The result of several years of research,
the standard consists of six vials of very carefully analyzed
DNA. Five are male samples, and one is female. Laboratories that
perform
forensics or paternity DNA analyses can use the SRM to double
check the accuracy of their equipment and test procedures for
analyzing
the Y chromosome. It also may be helpful for population studies
that study whether the human race evolved from one or many “Adams.”
Each
vial comes with certified DNA sequences for 22 different STR
locations and 42 different SNPs. NIST research chemist Margaret
Kline provided a detailed description of the
SRM and the
methods used in preparing it at the 14th International Symposium
on Human Identification in Phoenix, Ariz., on Oct. 1, 2003.
Media
Contact:
Gail Porter, (301)
975-3392
Electronics
Interconnections For Extreme Space Environments
If
all goes as planned, two rovers named Spirit and Opportunity
will explore the surface of Mars next year, gathering a wealth
of geologic information and beaming the results back to Earth.
However, the environment is so extreme that the rovers will
be equipped with heaters to keep the electronic gear warm enough
to operate properly over the Martian winter when temperatures
can dip to -120 degrees C. Future space probes will involve
even more extreme environments, with temperatures as high as
460 degrees Celsius (860 degrees Fahrenheit) on Venus and as
low as -180 Celsius (-292 Fahrenheit) on Titan, the largest
moon of Saturn.
George
Harman, a world authority on materials for microelectronic
interconnections and packaging at the
National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST), recently made a workshop presentation
for National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) engineers
at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on designing semiconductor
device interconnections to withstand extreme space environments.
Harman
recommended that spacebound microelectronics interconnections
be made with corrosion resis-tant, highly stable metals,
especially gold. He also suggested the use of some newer
polymers that
can withstand extreme temperatures but are not yet used in
the space
program. “Flip chips” are another interconnection
approach, that, with proper metallurgy, may make sense in high-temperature
planetary environments. Instead of using wire leads around
the edges of a microchip to export electrical signals, flip
chips
normally use a pattern of ball-shaped solder contacts that
are attached directly on the chip surface. Harman suggested
that
NASA consider using flip chips designed with gold contacts
to produce spacecraft electronics that are both space-saving
and
heat resistant.
Media
Contact:
Philip
Bulman,
(301) 975-5661
Quick
Links
Thirteen
Prepare for Baldrige Site Visits—Starting Oct. 19,
teams of business, education and health care experts will visit
13 organizations—three manufacturers, three service
companies, two small businesses, and two education and three health
care organizations—as the final review stage for the 2003
Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Baldrige award recipients
for 2003 are expected to be announced in November. Sixty-eight
organizations applied for the 2003 award. For more details, see
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/factsheet/nqa_appdata.htm.)
Media
Contact:
Jan Kosko,
(301) 975-2767