Gold nanoparticles are becoming the ... well ... gold standard for medical-use nanoparticles. A new paper by researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Cancer Institute’s Nanotechnology Characterization Laboratory (NCL) proposes not only a sort of gold nanoparticle “testbed” to explore how the tiny particles behave in biological systems, but also a paradigm for how to characterize nanoparticle formulations to determine just what you’re working with.