Neurophilosophy

The New York Times has a profile of researcher, author and science photographer Felice Frankel.

Frankel is a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a senior research fellow at Harvard University’s Faculty of the Arts and Sciences, where she is head of the Envisioning Science Program. The emphasis of the program is the use of images to communicate science. Frankel has written several books on the subject, and some of her writing on it can be found in her column for American Scientist.

Above is one of Frankel’s photographs. It shows a drop of ferrofluid on a microscope slide on a piece of yellow paper, beneath which is a magnet. Ferrofluids consist of iron (magnetite) nanoparticles suspended in an organic solvent or water, and therefore become strongly polarised in a magnetic field. That’s why the particles are so beautifully arranged - they’re organized along the magnet’s field lines.