Nautilus

Science Should Be Totally Beautiful

Felice Frankel lives between the lines. Along with being a part-time science photographer, she’s a researcher at the Center for Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“As a photographer,” Frankel says, “I look for edges.” Her previous career, as a photographer of architecture, taught her how to capture the most striking elements of a design. “But here’s the thing,” she says. “Edges don’t really exist. If you really, really get down to things, what looks like a clean separation from one place to another, when you investigate it microscopically or macroscopically, is not as

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