Clemson physics professor Apparao Rao and his team are researching nano-scale cantilevers that have the potential to read and alert us to toxic chemicals or gases in the air. Put them into a small handheld device and the potential is there for real-time chemical alerts in battle, in industry, in health care and even at home.

Over the last 10 years, researchers and clinicians have begun to use microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), which combine electronics technology with tiny mechanical devices like sensors and valves embedded in semiconductor chips--in the biomedical laboratory, to help automate diagnostic testing procedures.

Engineers and researchers designing and building new microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) can benefit from a new test method developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to measure a key mechanical property of such systems: elasticity.