The lost treasure of electron microscopy
Unpublished images should be brought to light to aid science communication and speed up discovery
A few years ago, I was preparing a popular lecture for a wide audience. My goal was simple: to show the beauty of chemistry through images taken with an electron microscope. I remembered that in one of our projects, we had recorded truly stunning pictures of a metal-on-carbon catalyst with striking variations in morphology. The surface looked like a fantastic landscape from another planet – craters, valleys and mountains frozen in nanoscale. I thought this would be perfect material for my talk.