A walk in the park provided inspiration for a striking photograph that earned national recognition this week for an engineering professor at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Zhao Pan was in a 500-year-old Beijing park in his native China after a sudden rainfall when he noticed huge drops of water hanging from the tips of leaves in cypress trees. “I play with droplets every day, but these were much larger than any I had seen in the lab,” he recalls. “I was amazed by Mother Nature, so I decided to do some research into it.”