A printed circuit board ~1 cm2 containing a CMOS integrated circuit and a loop antenna. Mercier et al. designed the chip to harvest the energy of the endocochlear potential in a guinea pig (p 1240). Credit: Rahul Rithe

Staircase inspired by a DNA spiral in the BC Cancer Agency Research Centre (Vancouver, BC, Canada). This issue brings together articles focused on DNA sequencing technology. Credit: © Nic Lehoux.

Stones traversing Death Valley in California; innovations in biomedicine often stall or die traversing the funding lacuna between basic research and product development (the so-called Valley of Death). Credit: Georg Gerster/Photo Researchers, Inc.

Visualization of mass cytometry cell signaling data from 14 cell types (y axis) identified in primary human peripheral blood mononuclear cells treated with 27 kinase inhibitors (x axis) and 14 stimuli (z axis). Bodenmiller et al. describe an approach for multiplexing samples for mass cytometry, which facilitates such largescale analyses (p 858). Credit: Erica Savig, Nolan Lab.

Artistic rendering of the process of reverse-engineering a jellyfish. Illustrated clockwise from the top, a juvenile Aurelia sp. is analyzed on the exterior (brightfield image) and interior (green, F-actin muscle stain; red, α-tubulin neuron stain; blue, DAPI nuclear stain), and the results are translated to micropatterning of rat cardiomyocytes on silicone polymer. The animal/construct diameter is ~9 mm (p 792). Credit: Janna Nawroth

A field emission scanning electron microscopy image of a primary breast cancer cell beginning to invade the surrounding extracellular matrix by extending filopodia. This issue includes a focus on cancer technologies. Credit: Lilian Soon.

Crystal structure of an optimized protein inhibitor (F-HB80.4) bound to the SC1918 H1 influenza hemagglutinin ectodomain. Whitehead et al. describe a deep-sequencing approach to increase the binding affinity of computationally designed inhibitors (p 543). Credit: Tim Whitehead.

Microorganisms from a mud sample collected in Lake Washington (Seattle). Zhang and colleagues describe a new approach to cloning that facilitates the identification of natural products from sequenced microorganisms or metagenomic samples (p 440). Credit: ©Dennis Kunkel Microscopy (colorization by Ekaterina Latypova). Sample from Mila Chistoserdova, University of Washington, Seattle.

A strand of DNA is released from a 'blocking oligomer' (red) and poised for ratcheting by phi29 DNA polymerase (coral) through an MspA protein nanopore (blue). Akeson and colleagues robustly control the speed of DNA translocation through a nanopore (p 344), and Gundlach and colleagues show that this enables single nucleotide-resolution analysis of the DNA bases (p 349). Credit: ©Kenneth Eward.

Teasel and Fields (Small), oil on aluminum, 2009. This issue brings together several articles on technologies for breeding plants for food, fuel or the production of industrial chemicals and biopharmaceuticals. Artwork by John Knight.

Smooth muscle cells (green) in the wall of a blood vessel. Cheung et al. generate several subtypes of vascular smooth muscle from human pluripotent stem cells (p 165). Credit: R. Bick, B. Poindexter, UT Medical School/Science Photo Library.

Structural models of chromosomes in nuclei on background image of raw experimental data. Kalhor et al. describe advances in mapping chromosome contacts and representing the resulting data as a population of structural models (p 90). Credit: Ian M. Slaymaker, Reza Kalhor and Harianto Tjong (three-dimensional rendering), and Marina Corral.