Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Strange Cover Art

A small part of me remembers a time before journal articles could all be accessed online. Back then, the cover art -- a creative expression of some of the newly-reported research between the covers -- could swing you towards one journal over another as you milled around the musty library stacks.
Source: Wiley-VCH, c. 2014 / ACIEdoi: 10.1002/anie.201409223

Nowadays, we've lost some of that artistic tradition, save for notable standouts Nature Chemistry and Angewandte Chemie. Hence, my confusion when looking at this week's Angewandte cover art - does anyone understand what's going on here? 

Best I can tell, this graphic is a nod to Prof. Younan Xia's excellent overview of the benefits and risks inherent to nano-scale research. But the graphic appears (to me, anyway) to resemble two angry Pokemon fighting over the sword from Legend of Zelda. About the only chemistry I see? Blink, and you'll miss it: along the blade are five tiny emblems meant to represent common nanostructures such as carbon nanotubes or micelles. 


Readers, am I missing something obvious here, or does this not really communicate the depth of Prof. Xia's review issue?




2 comments: