Arden L. Bement Jr. was named director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), effective Nov. 24. He had been acting director since February. Bement joined NSF from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he had been director since 2001. Before that, he was a professor of nuclear engineering and head of the School of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University. He was a member of the US National Science Board (NSB) from 1989 to 1995; he will now be an ex officio member. He also chaired the Commission for Engineering and Technical Studies and the National Materials Advisory Board of the National Research Council; was a member of the Space Station Utilization Advisory Subcommittee and the Commercialization and Technology Advisory Committee for NASA; and consulted for the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. He has been a director of Keithley Instruments Inc. and the Lord Corp. and was a member of the Science and Technology Advisory Committee for Howmet Corp., a division of Alcoa.    . . .    Bruker AXS Inc., a developer of advanced x-ray diffraction systems, and Albany NanoTech, a nanotechnology R&D complex and site of the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) at the University at Albany, State University of New York, have announced a cooperative agreement for x-ray characterization and metrology. Bruker AXS will provide Albany NanoTech with its D8 Discover for Wafers diffraction tool, which enables the structural characterization of nanolayers from 0.1 to 1000 nm, to analyze semiconductor heterostructures and develop new kinds of nanomaterials.