  IRIS (InfraRed Imaging Spectrograph) is a first light near-infrared
diffraction limited imager and integral field spectrograph being designed for
the future Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). IRIS is optimized to perform
astronomical studies across a significant fraction of cosmic time, from our
Solar System to distant newly formed galaxies (Barton et al. [1]). We present a
selection of the innovative science cases that are unique to IRIS in the era of
upcoming space and ground-based telescopes. We focus on integral field
spectroscopy of directly imaged exoplanet atmospheres, probing fundamental
physics in the Galactic Center, measuring 10^4 to 10^10 Msun supermassive black
hole masses, resolved spectroscopy of young star-forming galaxies (1 < z < 5)
and first light galaxies (6 < z < 12), and resolved spectroscopy of strong
gravitational lensed sources to measure dark matter substructure. For each of
these science cases we use the IRIS simulator (Wright et al. [2], Do et al.
[3]) to explore IRIS capabilities. To highlight the unique IRIS capabilities,
we also update the point and resolved source sensitivities for the integral
field spectrograph (IFS) in all five broadband filters (Z, Y, J, H, K) for the
finest spatial scale of 0.004" per spaxel. We briefly discuss future
development plans for the data reduction pipeline and quicklook software for
the IRIS instrument suite.
