The cover for the February 2008 edition of Chemical Reviews includes an image produced in the Visualization, Media, and Imaging Laboratory. The image, which is bottom right on the cover collage, depicts a plasmonic crystal array. It accompanies a paper by Matthew E. Stewart, Christopher R. Anderton, Lucas B. Thompson, Joana Maria, Stephen K. Gray, John A. Rogers, and Ralph G. Nuzzo on Nanostructured Plasmonic Sensors. ITG Visualization Specialist Alex Jerez created the image in the VMIL using several software packages, inclduing Amira, Maya, Photoshop, and After Effects.

New High Resolution X-Ray Micro-CT from Xradia A new high resolution X-Ray micro-CT from Xradia has been installed and is ready for users. The new micro-CT provides 1 micron resolution compared to the 5 micron resolution from SkyScan 1172 micro-CT currently in VMIL. Xradia micro-CT also comes with proprietary ultrafast reconstruction program that takes minutes rather than hours to reconstruct a 3-D model from hundreds of 2-D images. The new micro-CT includes a micro-focused 10W (40~150 KeV) Tungsten tube, TE-cooled 4 mega-pixel CCD camera, 5 microscopic objectives (2X, 4X, 10X, 20X and 40X), and high-precision 4-axis motorized sample stage. The 40~150 KeV X-ray energy level allows a wide spectrum of materials that can be imaged by the new system. Please contact Leilei Yin for more information.

The January 2008 issue of Nature Photonics features a cover image created by ITG depicting the work of Stephanie Rinne, Florencio García-Santamaría, and Paul Braun. The highlighted article describes their current research with embedded cavities and waveguides in three-dimensional silicon photonic crystals. The image was produced in the Visualization, Media, and Imaging Lab by ITG 3D Artist Steve Eisenmann. Eisenmann combined models created in a 3D application, bringing them into Maya for rendering and Photoshop for final compositing.

ITG created the cover image for the December 2007 cover of Nature Chemical Biology. The image illustrates the work by Hee-Kyung Kim, Ivan Rasnik, Juewen Liu, Taekjip Ha and Yi Lu, and accompanies their paper titled Dissecting metal ion–dependent folding and catalysis of a single DNAzyme. The image was created by Alex Jerez, Hee-Kyung Kim and Yi Lu.

ITG created the cover image for the October 29, 2007 issue of Inorganic Chemistry. The cover highlights the work of chemistry professor Greg Girolami, graduate students Do Young Kim and Yu Yang, and research professor John Abelson. The paper which accompanies the image describes their work in the invention and development of new chemical vapor deposition precursors, and the image specifically illustrates the synthesis of new magnesium compounds of the octahydrotriborate ion B3H8-, which have volatilities rivaling those of the most volatile magnesium compounds known. The image was created by ITG 3D artist Steve Eisenmann using Maya and custom MEL scripts he authored.

An animation produced by ITG to illustrate multidisciplinary research on artificial bone development was awarded a Semifinalist honor in the 2007 Visualization Challenge (sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science). The animation, titled 'Mandible Reconstruction Project', chronicles a unique effort that involved the University of Illinois College of Engineering, the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, Sandia National Laboratories, and Carle Foundation Hospital to develop an alternative approach to bone replacement--one that obviates the bone harvest surgery without diminishing the superior clinical outcomes associated with autografting. Portions of the animation have been shown on television news programs nationwide, and the full work was previously selected to be part of SIGGRAPH 2004's Computer Animation Festival.

Lifehacker, one of the world's most highly-read blogs on technology and life, recently highlighted ITG's Virtual Microscope project as an incredibly useful and interesting resource available from the nation's universities. The Virtual Microscope provides simulated microscopy software to browser and analyze high-resolution multi-dimensional image datasets. The software, which is open-source and available free to the public, has been downloaded over 75,000 times and is used worldwide for education and research. Lifehacker's link to our project pushed web traffic to the site up 1000% and increased software downloads by 300%. Lifehacker is rated as the #6 most-linked-to blog in the world by Technorati.

ITG has been awarded $2 million from the National Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to acquire a revolutionary multi-length scale x-ray nanotomography (nano-CT) instrument. This device, which will be the first such instrument at a US university, will support nondestructive internal 3-D imaging of samples as thick as 0.1 millimeter while resolving features as small as 30 nanometers in width. The award, which was for the full amount requested ($1.998 million), puts it in the top 1% of MRI awards historically (in terms of funding level), and is the largest MRI award ever made to UIUC. As a result, the nano-CT will become the most expensive instrument in ITG by about $1 million, and should cement UIUC as a center for micro- and nano-tomographic imaging. The grant effort was led by ITG Director Ben Grosser and Materials Science Professor Paul Braun. We hope to have the instrument up and running in Spring 2008.

The cover for the April 2007 edition of Chemical Reviews includes an image produced in the Visualization, Media, and Imaging Lab for John Rogers' group. The image, which is bottom center on the cover collage, depicts a section of a multiple-active layer single-crystal silicon TFT array. The overall image accompanies an extensive paper by Etienne Menard, John Rogers, et al. on Micro- and Nanopatterning Techniques for Organic Electronic and Optoelectronic Systems. The image was created using Amira and Photoshop in the VMIL by Janet Sinn-Hanlon, and utilizes the original confocal image data.