Chemical & Engineering News picks photo contest winner

Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) today announced the winners of its inaugural photo contest. C&EN is the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society.

First place went to Drexel University materials science graduate student Jennifer S. Atchison. She made the silicon nanocones shown (right) in a dazzling, scanning electron microscope image. The cones, barely 1/50,000th the width of a human hair, formed through the decomposition of silane, a silicon-like compound, at a high temperature in a chemical vapor deposition apparatus. It produced the kind of thin films often used by the semiconductor industry.

The second place winner, Robert L. D'Ordine, Ph.D., a biochemist in Ballwin, Mo., submitted a picture of a magnetic stirrer, a beaker of water, and colored paper used to capture a whirring mass of water (water vortex), a familiar laboratory phenomenon. Third place winner Ryan O'Donnell, now a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, submitted a colorful light microscopy image of ammonium nitrate crystals.

Readers responded enthusiastically to the contest, submitting nearly 250 images on all things chemical. Connected loosely by the broad theme, "Your Science Up Close," the photos in this collection range from the macroscopic to the microscopic and from the everyday lab scene to the "that wasn't supposed to happen." Winners will receive gift cards.