NIST centennial celebration

The Centennial Celebration of the Nat’l Inst. of Standards and Technology (NIST), formerly the Nat’l Bureau of Standards (NBS), takes place in the year 2001. NIST has made significant contributions to the advancement of the fields of crystallography, biology and materials science. The research has been carried out as a fundamental part of the overall mission of NBS/NIST and has become an integral part of many aspects of its research programs. Eleven pages of the Winter ACA Newsletter were devoted to articles written by NIST crystallographers describing past accomplishments and current activities. The articles cover a broad spectrum of topics including structural databases, high-pressure crystallography, neutron crystallography, structure determination via neutron and x-ray diffraction, quasicrystals, reduced cells, magnetic structure determinations, polymer crystallography, electron diffraction, properties of materials databases, protein crystallography, novel biomaterials, biological minerals, crystallography of construction materials, and synchrotron radiation. There will be a one-day symposium honoring the NIST centennial at the ACA 2001 meeting in Los Angeles.