Slideshow: Images of the year
From the special:
2008
Credit: John Hart, Sameh Tawfick, Michael De Volder, and Will Walker - University of Michigan
Nanobamas
These half-millimetre-wide portraits of the next president of the United States are each composed of 150 million carbon nanotubes – the same figure as the number of people who voted in the US election. No prizes for guessing who John Hart, a mechanical engineer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, supported.
Credit: Francesco Rovero
Say hello, sengi
In the northern Udzungwa Mountains of Tanzania, researchers discovered a new species of sengi, or elephant shrew. The grey-faced sengi (Rhynchocyon udzungwensis), the largest yet known, was introduced to the world in January in the pages of the Journal of Zoology.
Credit: N. Pool/Getty Images
The ire of Ike
Hurricane Ike killed more than 100 people and did billions of dollars' worth of damage this year. Gilchrist, Texas, took a battering on 13 September.
Credit: Daina Taimina
Cuddly topology
Mathematician Daina Taimina of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, displayed this crocheted hyperbolic plane as part of the 'Beyond Measure' exhibition at Kettle's Yard gallery in Cambridge, UK.
Credit: S. Schuller/Wellcome Images
Fluorescent villi
Stunning images of biological structures such as these intestinal villi – fingerlike projections that increase the surface area of the gut available to absorb food – are made possible by glowing fluorescent proteins used to tag specific proteins in cells. The technology won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Opportunity escapes
After investigating Victoria crater on Mars for almost a year, the rover Opportunity retraced its tracks out onto level ground in late August.
Credit: Sharvari Dalal
Nanotinsel
This coloured scanning electron microscope image shows zinc oxide nanowires grown on carbon fibres, each about 10 micrometres wide. The image, created by graduate student Sharvari Dalal, was part of the annual photo competition organized by the engineering department of the University of Cambridge, UK.
Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Spot the planet
Among the starlight and debris that surround the star Fomalhaut is a tiny dot (circled): planet Fomalhaut b. Researchers estimated in November that it is 25 light years from Earth and no more than three times the mass of Jupiter.
Credit: Jessica D. Schiffman and Caroline L. Schauer; Drexel University
Squid Suckers
When deciding how to colour the various parts of a squid's suckers in this electron micrograph, Jessica Schiffman of Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, thought of the film Little Shop of Horrors. The resulting image won an honourable mention in the International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.
Credit: John Innes Centre
Tomorrow's tomato
A dash of snapdragon genes turns a run-of-the-salad tomato into a deep purple, anthocyanin-packed life-extender – at least for mice susceptible to cancer, says tomato-gene juggler Cathie Martin of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK.
Credit: NASA/JSC
Orion or Icarus
It "dropped faster than intended", explained NASA. This mock-up of the Orion crew exploration vehicle, lying nose down in the dust outside Yuma, Arizona, was undergoing a parachute test in July as part of NASA's Constellation programme to send human explorers back to the Moon.
Credit: H. OTT/T. MATTHIESEN
Ghost heart
The rat heart at the top is recognizably red and fleshy. The bottom heart has been stripped of all its cells with detergent, and is now nothing more than collagen and other bits of the extracellular matrix. These structures could one day be used as scaffolds for engineered hearts, according to bioengineers at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Wisconsin
Meet the Milky Way
This is a section from a very long image of our Galaxy, as seen at infrared frequencies by the Spitzer Space Telescope. The full image, 60 metres long at full resolution, was made up of 800,000 frames and debuted at the American Astronomical Society meeting in St Louis, Missouri, in June.
Credit: © 2008 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.
Cough
Researchers at the gas-dynamics laboratory of Pennsylvania State University in University Park visualized a cough by tracking changes in air density, and provided compelling evidence that it really is polite to cover your mouth as you hack away.
Credit: Nick Cobbing
Crystal crash pad
Chemistry becomes art in Seizure. Artist Roger Hiorns and his assistants sealed off a condemned flat in London and filled it with 90,000 litres of hot copper sulphate solution, which formed crystals as it cooled, turning the space into a blue grotto.
Credit: NASA / LOIRP
A forgotten first
This image of Earth was originally taken by NASA's Lunar Orbiter probe in 1966, making it two years older than the iconic 'Earthrise' picture taken during the Apollo 8 mission. The probe's pictures are being reconstructed from analogue data so that they can be compared with digital images from the 2009 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mapping mission.
