Nanoflage

Nano-Flowers

Mulmudi Hemant Kumar, Nanyang Technological University (First Place)

This lush bouquet is actually a false-color image of nanoflowers made from zinc-doped tin oxide. As structures, nanoflowers offer an enormous amount of surface area packed into a very small space, and could be useful in solar cells and batteries.

Castle Ruins Over a Field of Nanotubes

Julien Schweicher, University of California, San Francisco

What looks like the wreckage of an interplanetary war is actually a scanning electron microscope image of a titanium dioxide nanotubular layer, after exposure to a buffered oxide etch solution.

Tetraaniline in Full Bloom

Yue Wang, University of California, Los Angeles (First Place)

Be glad you can't smell this flower. It's made from thin sheets of aniline, a compound that smells like rotten fish. In this false-color image, the aggregated sheets in the upper right corner form a cluster looks like a flower, while other flexible sheets looks more like stems and leaves. These shapes combine high surface area with electrical conductivity, making this material ideal for organic supercapacitors and sensors.

Science as Art: Nanoscale Materials Imitate Everything From Flowers to Frost
Nadia Drake 04.15.13
Images courtesy of the Materials Research Society Science as Art Competition and Mulmudi Hemant Kumar, Nanyang Technological University.