With this issue Cambridge University Press completes ten years of publishing Microscopy Today. Over the last decade this magazine has grown in subscriptions, participated in conferences worldwide, and sponsored two international competitions: one dealing with microscopy innovations and the other with exceptional micrographs. To celebrate this anniversary, the Press has created a digital compendium of 60 concise reviews by Stephen Carmichael, freely available at the Microscopy Today website (click on article collections).
The cover of this issue shows the 25 finalists of the 2019 Microscopy Today Micrograph Awards competition. There are three categories: Published images (column 1), Open category for unpublished images (columns 2, 3, and 4), and Video images (column 5). Finalist micrographs must have scientific relevance, but the primary criteria are visual impact, artistic merit, and how it would look on a wall. The selection of these finalists was blind, in that the judges did not know the identity or affiliation of the submitters. Images were submitted from 24 US states and 16 other countries. The public is invited to vote for the People's Choice Award by viewing finalist images in the gallery at the following website: https://www.microscopy.org/awards/micrograph_gallery.cfm. Chief Micrograph Judge Robert Simmons will announce all the prize winners on Wednesday of the M&M meeting in Portland, OR. I thank celebrity judge David Scharf and our senior editors who constituted our judging panel for this inaugural micrograph competition.
The Microscopy Today Innovation Awards competition is also in its tenth year. Thus, by the Portland M&M meeting, this magazine in collaboration with Cambridge University Press will have presented 100 awards for innovations in all types of microscopy and microanalysis. I believe our field is quite extraordinary in that significant advances are made every few years in nearly every type of microscopy. Chief Innovations Judge Tom Kelly will present these awards on Wednesday of M&M.
Finally, a new Cambridge Core website for Microscopy Today (MTO) has been designed, and it includes three new article collections from past issues: Carmichael's Concise Reviews (mentioned above), Education Articles, and Innovations Articles describing each honored innovation. The compendium of Carmichael's reviews is especially noteworthy. For each of his reviews Carmichael identifies a paper that describes a problem in science which has been solved by microscopy. This is followed by a brief description of how the work was accomplished. The searching and finding of papers for these reviews is particularly impressive considering the word “microscopy” often does not appear in the paper's title or in the abstract.
The Microscopy Society of America and the editorial staff and board of Microscopy Today thank Cambridge University Press for a most fruitful partnership.
