And The Winners Are...

Drexel University materials science graduate student Jennifer S. Atchison made the silicon nanocones shown in this scanning electron microscope image by decomposing silane at high temperature in a chemical vapor deposition apparatus.

As an undergraduate, Ryan O'Donnell, now at Johns Hopkins University, studied explosives with ion mobility spectrometry. The colorful birefringence pattern in this image comes from examining a micrometer-sized ammonium nitrate crystallite via cross-polarization light microscopy.

Looking at inorganic compounds doesn't usually put chemists in a musical kind of mood. But there can be exceptions. "Solid vanadyl sulfate is one of the bluest compounds I know," wails Philip J. Squattrito, a chemistry professor at Central Michigan University.

Putting a literal twist on a comic-strip illustrator's device, University of Rochester grad student Karen Chiang focused her thoughts on "Nontraditional Careers for Chemists" by Lisa M. Balbes by photographing the book cover through a bubble-filled glass of water.

A magnetic stirrer, a beaker of water, and colored paper were all Robert L. D'Ordine, a biochemist in Ballwin, Mo., needed to capture this familiar laboratory phenomenon. "I would watch the vortex form as the stirrer sped up. Sometimes it was quite relaxing," D'Ordine says.

In the Natural Polymers & Photonics Laboratory at Drexel University, researchers convert polysaccharides into nanofibers and thin films for use in water purification and other applications. In Marjorie S. Austero's experiment, adding excess cross-linker to chitosan yielded the fine-fibered material seen in the colored SEM image (above). Keith J. Fahnestock's chitosan-electrospinning run (results shown above at right) didn't go as planned. Rather than generating nanoscale fibers, the experiment produced micrometer-sized blobs. "In science, never cry over spilled milk. Take a picture of it instead," Fahnestock suggests.

Thomas Lazzara, a Ph.D. student at the University of Göttingen's Institute for Organic &Biomolecular Chemistry, in Germany, captured the imagebelow of vesicles fluorescently labeled with Texas Red and filled with sucrose as they sank to the bottom of a petri dish filled with a low-density buffer.