What Is the
Mystery Image Contest?
The Mystery Image Contest offers the chance to identify a science-related object based on a close-up picture of it.
Most people have probably grown up hearing that "no two snowflakes are alike," but this fact was not always common knowledge. Beginning in the early 1600s in Europe, mathematicians and philosophers like Johannes Kepler and Rene Descartes observed the hexagonal shape of most snowflakes and their seeming uniqueness, though they were limited by what they could see with the naked eye. Neither could quite believe that every individual snowflake could be one-of-a-kind. It wasn't until the invention of the microscope in the later 1600s, and, much later, the invention of photography, that people were able to see and study snowflakes more closely. For instance, Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley was an American farmer who became famous in the early 1900s for carefully photographing over 5000 individual snowflakes, showing that no two were alike. In the mid-1900s, Japanese physicist Ukichiro Nakaya greatly advanced scientific understanding of snow crystal formation by studying natural snowflakes in great detail and then discovering how to "grow" artificial snowflakes in the laboratory. Nowadays, images of snowflakes like the one above are taken with low-temperature scanning electron microscopes (LT-SEM) which offer much more detail than any traditional cameras or microscopes. To use LT-SEM to capture snowflakes, snow or ice samples are placed on copper sample plates and then submerged in liquid nitrogen to keep them frozen at -196 degrees Celsius. Keeping the samples at this temperature stops the snowflakes from melting or being damaged before they can be photographed. When they are ready to be photographed, the samples are coated with a very thin layer of platinum, which makes them electrically conducive and allows them to be visible to the LT-SEM. LT-SEM allows for taking images at extremely high magnification, allowing for the sort of detail you see in the picture chosen for this Mystery Image Contest.
This image is of a snow crystal (aka a snowflake) as captured by a scanning electron microscope.
Electron and Confocal Microscopy Lab, Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture
Our winners are:
Ms. Day/Mrs. Cumps' 8th grade, Petersburg, AK
Candy Durham, Dalton State College, GA
Science NetLinks Mystery Image Contest Rules and Regulations
The Mystery Image Contest offers the chance to identify a science-related object based on a close-up picture of it.