Impacts in Progress
A Sampling of Story Ideas from Today's NIST

Helping the Blind Access Electronic Data
For the nearly 11 million blind and visually impaired people in North America and millions more worldwide, the on-ramp to the Information Superhighway has been blocked for a long time. Now with NIST’s help, the barricades are coming down.

The NIST Rotating-Wheel Based Refreshable Braille Display is an instrument that receives digital input from electronic book readers, personal digital assistants or desktop computers, and converts it to a continuously updated Braille output. This gives the blind and visually impaired access to electronic books, online documents, e-mail and web pages. The latest version of the NIST device incorporates several design improvements from the prototype tested during the year 2000.

For example, many blind and visually impaired people prefer to read Braille using several fingers, and the original design only allowed for reading with a single finger. The new NIST Braille Display also is more compact and mechanically simpler than the original. It also employs software to translate text into Braille and features variable speed that allows people to read faster or slower, or to pause the device. NIST estimates that the device could be manufactured for about $1,000, significantly less than the up-to-$15,000 for current systems.

Contact: Philip Bulman, (301) 975-5661.

‘No-Crash’ System Stays on Road to Success
Some 3,000 Americans each day doze off or get distracted behind the wheel of a moving vehicle and run off the road. Lane-departure warning systems—already installed on some commercial trucks—may be options for U.S. car buyers within the next two or three years. If this “smart” technology takes off and becomes widely available, estimates predict it could prevent some 160,000 crashes and 1,500 deaths annually.

To ensure that the warning systems work as desired, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently contracted with intelligent-vehicle researchers at NIST to develop tests that manufacturers and regulators can use to evaluate system performance. The NIST team is designing tests for assessing how accurately and reliably the technology alerts drivers to unintended lane departures before they occur.

Contact: Michael E. Newman, (301) 975-3025

Everyday Is SUNday Inside the Sphere
Strength, safety and color fastness are important to manufacturers who test their products’ ability to withstand UV exposure. However, outdoor tests take too long, often going for years. Indoor devices can accelerate testing but do not always provide optimal results.

NIST researchers have developed a spherical device that distributes UV radiation uniformly into 32 specimen chambers, ensuring reproducible test results. The device is calculated to accelerate UV exposure 30 to 65 times faster than natural solar exposure. Materials exposed to the sphere’s UV light for one day potentially receive the equivalent of 65 days of sun. Two months could equal more than 10 years of solar exposure.

Contact: John Blair, (301) 975-4261

Rebuilding Bone with the Help of Technology
The combination of tissue engineering with materials science holds the promise of producing biomaterials capable of regenerating bone that has been broken or lost to disease. Researchers at the American Dental Association Health Foundation/NIST Paffenbarger Research Center in Gaithersburg, Md., are working to expand the use of bone repair material—primarily calcium phosphate cement—beyond what’s possible today.

Calcium phosphate cement, which the body readily accepts, replaces a section of bone and serves as scaffolding around which new bone forms in the same shape. Use of this biomaterial is now limited to those areas of the body that do not move or bear any stress.

The ADA/NIST team hopes to expand these limited capabilities by modifying existing biomaterials and developing new ones. The goal is to produce biomaterials that can handle the physical demands on bone where movement and stress are factors. One benefit would be to shorten the time for installing dental implants to days rather than months.

Contact: Pamela Houghtaling, (301) 975-5745

Ensuring Quality for New Therapies
Physicians and physicists have teamed up to bring prostate cancer and heart patients a new treatment option that could replace many invasive surgeries and lessen hospital time. Most importantly, this method—the implantation of tiny radioactive seeds to treat prostate tumors and coronary artery blockage—could play a significant role in reducing the 725,000 heart disease and 32,000 prostate cancer deaths annually. Physicists at NIST are helping advance this new therapy by calibrating the radiation doses delivered by the radioactive seeds.

These new treatments, using small (rice-sized) radioactive sources, offer the advantage of delivering a high radiation dose to the target cells while minimizing the radiation damage to healthy tissue. NIST is the only laboratory in the world that offers calibrations of the radioactive seed sources for prostate cancer. The intravascular applications of these radioactive sources are still in clinical trials, and FDA approval will be required before such treatments are available to the public.

Contact: Michael Baum, (301) 975-2763

Setting Standards from Chocolate to Bullets
Spinach leaves, whale blubber, pine needles and industrial sludge are among the nearly 1,300 materials that NIST has characterized for specific physical and chemical properties using state-of-the-art measurement methods. Known as Standard Reference Materials, these certified artifacts are used to establish the quality and reliability of devices, goods, medical data and scientific results.

An interesting collection of new measurement references is currently under development at NIST. One example is an SRM of fired bullets and casings to help connect firearms to specific crimes. Another measures more precisely a protein that could signal the early stages of a heart attack. A third, the chocolate SRM, will be used as a benchmark for determining whether foods really do contain the fat and carbohydrate content listed on the label. Also in the works are SRMs for additives in smokeless gunpowder, antibiotics in milk, abrasiveness of toothpaste and organic contaminants in household dust.

Contact: John Blair, (301) 975-4261

Retrieving Data from Damaged Magnetic Tape
A new microscopy technique could become an important tool for law enforcement and accident investigators seeking data (either digital or analog) from magnetic tracks on damaged, altered or erased tapes or other storage media. Termed second harmonic magneto-resistive microscopy (also known as SH-MRM), it makes use of high-resolution magnetic sensors developed for modern computer hard disk drives.

Researchers at NIST and the National Telecommunication and Information Administration laboratories in Boulder, Colo., recently demonstrated that their system could recover audio data from a tape fragment provided by the National Transportation Safety Board. They also showed that raw digital data can be read from a very short segment of tape from a flight data recorder. For the FBI, they revealed magnetic marks produced by the erase and record heads during the recording process. They also showed that audio data from test tracks can be reconstructed and played back directly from the SH-MRM images.

Contact: Fred McGehan (Boulder), (303) 497-3246

NIST Teams with EPA to Clear the Air
In 2000, NIST joined an interagency effort led by the Environmental Protection Agency—the National Particulate Matter Research Program—aimed at improving the nation’s air quality and public health.

Particulate matter is a mix of coarse and fine particles in the air produced by natural processes as well as human activities. About 10 to 100 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, fine particulate matter can consist of dust, ashes, soot and sea salt aerosols. The challenge is to identify and measure accurately the chemical components—specifically, the toxic ones—and collect enough particulate to constitute a representative sample. NIST and its NPMRP partners will develop urban particulate matter reference materials, a special thin-film glass standard for X-ray fluorescence analysis and technology for large-scale collection of fine airborne particulate matter. This will enable the accurate measurement of emissions from various pollutant sources such as industrial plants and vehicles.

Contact: Pamela Houghtaling, (301) 975-5745

Quality Pays Off Six Straight Years
Although you won’t find it listed in the financial section of the newspaper, the “Baldrige Index” once again (for the sixth consecutive year) outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500 in a report issued in February 2000. The year 2000 margin of 4.8 to 1 was one of the highest returns since NIST started doing the study in 1995.

The “Baldrige Index” is a fictitious stock fund made up of publicly traded US companies that have received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. NIST “invested” a hypothetical $1,000 in each of the whole company winners, and the investments were tracked from the first business day of the month following the announcement of award recipients through Dec. 1, 1999. Adjustments were made for stock splits. Another $1,000 hypothetically was invested in the S&P 500 for the same time period.

The “Baldrige Index” achieved a 1,101 percent return on investment, compared to a 228 percent return for the S&P 500.

More recently, NIST compared the Baldrige Award whole company winners to large cap blend funds, a category of mutual funds monitored by Morningstar Inc. that best matches the Baldrige index. This comparison showed the group of Baldrige winners outperforming the average return (148 percent) for these funds by 7.4 to 1.

Contact: Jan Kosko, (301) 975-2767

ATP Jump Starts Innovative Technologies
Since 1990, the NIST Advanced Technology Program has worked to spur the development of path-breaking new technologies by providing cost-shared funding for potentially valuable but high-risk R&D projects. Nearly 200 projects have been completed, and more than 200 currently are under way. In industry after industry—medical diagnostics, semiconductor manufacturing, automobiles, telecommunications, information technology, electronics, high-performance composites, biotechnology—the United States can offer the world’s markets many leading-edge technologies that wouldn’t exist without the ATP.

In 2000, the NIST ATP chose 54 industrial research projects for cost-shared support ($130 million from private industry matched by approximately $144 million from the ATP). The selected projects enable a broad array of technologies, including pharmaceutical design, tissue engineering, industrial catalysts, energy generation and storage, manufacturing technologies, electronics manufacturing, computer software and electro-optics.

One recent ATP success story is CuraGen Corp., a New Haven, Conn., company, that has built what are believed to be the world’s smallest working pumps. With individual components only a micrometer or less wide, the tiny pumps are engineered like integrated circuits on silicon wafers in order to move fragments of DNA from one place to another.

Developed with support from the ATP, the tiny pumps are potential components in DNA analysis chips—miniaturized devices that combine the functions of an entire DNA laboratory on a chip similar to a computer microchip. Along with moving DNA across chips, the CuraGen researchers believe that the micropumps also may be useful in separating DNA fragments by size, since the smaller pieces tend to go through the pump faster.

Contact: Michael Baum, (301) 975-2763

Small Manufacturers Spell Success M-E-P
The NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership is a nationwide system of resources assisting smaller manufacturers in becoming more competitive by addressing their most critical and often unique needs. Started in 1989, today’s NIST MEP network consists of more than 400 manufacturing extension centers and field offices delivering services to manufacturers in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Each center represents a unique blend of federal, state and local resources.

Many studies are finding that small manufacturers who work with their local NIST MEP center show dramatic improvements. For example, in a recent survey of NIST MEP client companies served in the last nine months of FY 1999, 2,942 firms reported that, as a result of NIST MEP services, they: (1) created or retained 18,153 jobs; (2) increased or retained $1.4 billion in sales; and (3) realized $364 million in cost savings.

Just ask Chilly Willee, the Belvidere, Ill., company that produces machines that dispense frozen drinks in convenience stores and concession stands, what a difference the NIST MEP can make. The company’s machines are often operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As a result, gearbox parts required frequent upkeep and replacement. Complaints from customers about maintenance problems became all too common.

Chilly Willee contacted the Illinois Manufacturing Extension Center, for help in designing an improved gearbox. IMEC and a local engineering consultant, Creative Design Solutions Inc., developed a self-lubricating, virtually maintenance-free gearbox. The new design will save about $15,000 in annual labor costs, decrease downtime of the machines and increase customer satisfaction.

Contact: Jan Kosko, (301) 975-2767

The impacts listed in this fact sheet were all taken from recent issues of NIST’s two newsletters, NIST Update and NIST Tech Beat. NIST Update, published every two weeks, highlights NIST research, activities, services and people. NIST Tech Beat, published monthly, is a lay language tip sheet for science writers, To subscribe to either the print or electronic versions of both newsletters, fill out the online form at www.nist.gov/public_affairs/mailform.htm.

Created on January 9, 2001
Contact: inquiries@nist.gov