The Manufacturing Cost Guide is a tool that estimates the costs that US manufacturers face and can be used to help gauge the potential returns on manufacturing industry research projects through cost reductions. These costs are grouped into various standardized categories such as the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) and the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system along with other non-standardized costs.

The tool can be used to answer questions such as:

Materials discovery and development necessarily begins with the preparation and identification of product phase(s). Crystalline compounds can be identified by their characteristic diffraction patterns using X-rays, neutrons, and or electrons. An estimated 20,000 X-ray diffractometers and a comparable number of electron microscopes are used daily in materials research and development laboratories for this purpose.

The Micronutrients Measurement Quality Assurance Program (MMQAP) was coordinated by the Chemical Sciences Division and supported measurement technology for selected fat- and water-soluble vitamins and carotenoids in human serum. This program was initiated in 1984 by the National Cancer Institute Division of Cancer Prevention and Control to ensure the long-term reliability of the measurements made while studying the possible cancer chemoprevention roles of these compounds.

All the data in this project are generated running Density Functional (DFT) simulation either on NIST computer clusters of through our collaborators at University of Florida. The final data consist in relaxed atomic structures and corresponding energetic, mechanical, electronic and phonon properties. The metadata consist in the initial and relaxed structures, the description of the code, of the k points and of all the parameters used in running the simulations (energy or real space cutoff, type of minimization, occupation, etc.).