Once again, we asked for your best materials research-related images for our cover. And once again, you surprised us with the number and quality of the entries.

The 15 images selected as finalists are displayed here.

Click on each thumbnail to display the image in its full glory!

This year’s winner is Pedro M. F. J. Costa of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan, whose image appears on the cover of the December 2007 issue of Materials Today.

Winner: Pedro M. F. J. Costa, National Institute of Materials Science, Japan A large, deformed CdS nanobelt entangled by a smaller one.	Runner up: Alois Lugstein, TU Wien, Austria Single-crystalline GaAs branches growing from Si nanowire trunks.	Amanda S. Barnard, University of Oxford, UK First principles calculations can reveal which BN nanotubes will be stable or useful.
Roshan Chapaneri, G.W. Critchlow, and G.D. Wilcox, Loughborough Uni., UK Inherent stress within a hexavalent chromium conversion coating on zinc electrodeposited steel results in microcracking.	Fabien Choffat, ETH Zürich, Switzerland An oriented film of a new semiconducting liquid-crystalline material produced by simple shearing with a spatula at room temperature.	Seth Darling, Argonne National Laboratory, USA A mixed self-assembled monolayer showing small domains of two different components.
J. M. González-Leal and J. D. Leal, University of Cadiz and School of Arts, Cadiz, Spain Different orientations of students in a car park represent different domains in polycrystalline materials.	Susan E. Habas, Hyunjoo Lee, Velimir Radmilovic, Gabor A. Somorjai, and Peidong Yang, University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA Pt nanocubes act as seeds for Pd overgrowth to give cubic binary metallic nanocrystals.	Rafal Klajn, Northwestern University, USA Au supraspheres - aggregates of nanoparticles connected by long linkers – behave like plasticine and stick to one another in free-standing structures.
Vladimir Komlev, Institute for Physical Chemistry of Ceramics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia Tomography image of a tissue engineering construct for skeletal muscle regeneration.	Yanlin Luo and David Carr, George Mason University, USA A supercell of a cation-exchanged zeolite-L.	Zhiping Luo, Texas A&M University, USA This colored TEM image shows Au nanoparticles distributed on the surface of a silica sphere, forming brain-like reticulations.
Verónica I. Mega, Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica, Argentina A natural composite of a biodegradable polymer reinforced with hemp fibers.	Igor Sokolov, Clarkson University, USA A large number of organic fluorescent molecules are physically entrapped inside these nanoporous silica particles.	Natalie Stingelin-Stutzmann, Queen Mary, University of London, UK Polarized optical micrograph of rubrene crystals growing from an amorphous matrix.