So the bad news is that this image was not chosen for the cover of this week's issue of Nature. It was beaten out by something quite literally more sexy. It is a stunning photograph of an Australian bearded dragon, which is now the first reptile to have been found to undergo sex reversal in the wild. Add to that a temperature dependence to the sex determination that has scientists wondering about their ability to adapt to climate change. Hard to compete with that.
A colloidal quantum dot spectrometer. Bao J, Bawendi MG. Nature. 2015 Jul 1;523(7558):67-70. doi: 10.1038/nature14576.
The good news is that variations of the image that I also made for the project were picked up by various news outlets including the MIT News Office, Popular Mechanics, SciFeeds, Scitech Daily, Product Design and Development, and myScience. I had to give Popular Mechanics a little tap on the shoulder to remind them to credit the image to me, but they acknowledged and fixed their mistake faster than an Australian bearded dragon can say. "What the what? I thought those were going to be ovaries!"