(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- Thermometers can do a lot of things: measure the temperature at the center of your perfectly braised chicken or tell you whether to keep your child home from school due to illness. But because of their size, traditional thermometers are limited in their uses.

“How do you noninvasively measure a temperature inside a living system such as a human?” asks NIST’s Thinh Bui. “Or in other environments that may be hard to access—say, the temperature inside a Kevlar vest as a bullet penetrates it. How do you have access to that? You can’t stick a traditional thermometer in there.”

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