William Overman began his Ph.D. program at Stanford Graduate School of Business at an auspicious moment—just two months before ChatGPT publicly launched in November 2022, exploding widely held understandings of what machines can do.

Even as Overman began enlisting AI for his research, he grew wary of where the technology was headed. “This isn’t only about the apocalyptic…

Most early-stage medical device companies never decide to skip a quality management system (QMS). They just never decide to buy one. The founding team opens a shared drive, builds a spreadsheet for design inputs and outputs, starts a document register in another tab, and agrees to sort out the real system closer to submission. On the invoice, that approach costs nothing. But that zero is…

Painter Bob Ross taught us that “happy accidents” can make beautiful art. Happy accidents also happen in science when experiments take research in unexpected directions. One dramatic example is Sir Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin.

Not all unexpected scientific developments are that momentous, but our NIST researchers have found similarly unexpected…