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Science is all around. Phenomenal Moments: Revealing the Hidden Science Around Us(Candlewick/MiTeenPress, November 4, 2025) is a joyful invitation to discover just how amazing our world is. Organized into five thematic sections, the book turns learning about science into a guessing game. Detailed photographs like the ones below taken by MIT researcher and science photographer Felice Frankel challenge readers to deduce the underlying chemical, natural, or physical processes at play. Then, with the a turn of the page, the scientific explanation is revealed. Images are republished with permission. (Click to expand images to full screen.)
Although it appears to be a single stunningly beautiful flower, the gerbera is a composite of hundreds of flowers with three different subgroups. The central disk, appearing green here, contains the subgroup called disk florets. Surrounding the central disk are the trans florets. Look carefully in the trans area to find the small yellow structures. These are stamens. Image: Felice Frankel.While walking past a storefront that was being painted with all sorts of colors, I noticed quite a bit of the paint splattered on the sidewalk. It reminded me of a Jackson Pollock painting. The patterns of droplets, dribbles, and swaths of paint depend on the viscosity among other things. Image: Felice Frankel.The traces of sand on the stairs, previously suspended in the ocean’s water, were brought in with high tide, which occurs when the moon exerts its gravitational pull on the Earth. Image: Felice Frankel.Autumn is my favorite time of the year. The colors of the leaves are caused by the breakdown of the green pigment called chlorophyll. Chlorophyll helps the leaves extract energy from sunlight. Since the chlorophyll is not being replenished in the autumn, the yellowish and red pigments now can be seen. Image: Felice Frankel.I always find it fascinating seeing bubbles form after I pour carbonated water into a glass. The bubbles are carbon dioxide that is dissolved in the liquid under pressure. When we open a bottle or can, the pressure is released and the carbon dioxide comes out of the solution as bubbles or effervescence. Image: Felice Frankel.Lamb’s ear has a hairy surface that makes the leaves hydrophobic. When water comes into contact with the leaves, it beads up and rolls off rather than sitting on the leaf surface. The effect provides nature with a way of cleaning the leaves. Image: Felice Frankel.While sautéing yellow, orange, red, and green peppers for a pasta dish on my induction stove, the glass cover on my pan began to reflect all the wonderful colors. Heat from the cooking surface caused the water from the peppers to vaporize, creating steam that was captured by the glass cover. The water coalesced into larger drops, forming condensation on the glass. Image: Felice Frankel.Have you ever seen white strawberries? It turns out that they are not strawberries, but pineberries, which are very similar to the red strawberries we are used to seeing. Both of these types of berries appear to have “seeds” on the surface, but those dots are not actually seeds. They are the plant’s ovaries, called achenes. Image: Felice Frankel.This metal fence was originally painted green, but corrosion has caused the steel of the fence to rust and paint to flake off. Rust (iron oxide, which is red or yellowish) is formed from oxidation. Image: Felice Frankel. When the bottom of my copper pot was exposed to heat and air, it was oxidized, leading to the formation of a thin layer of copper compounds—especially copper carbonate—on its surface. We call the process patina formation (or just patination). Over time, different types of oxidation reactions take place, forming various copper compounds. The different compounds produce the colors. Image: Felice Frankel. The bright sun glitter in the foreground is a result of sunlight reflecting off a rippled surface of water. The angle of the sun hitting the waves determines the shapes of the sun’s reflection. Where you stand makes a difference to what you see. Image: Felice Frankel. Over many years of geological time, opal is slowly formed as many small spheres of silica (what glass is made of) self-assemble into perfectly ordered layers. Diffraction (not to be confused with refraction) occurs when light passes through the spheres and gaps, and it is split into the colors of the visible spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Image: Felice Frankel.
Phenomenal Moments: Revealing the Hidden Science Around Us (Candlewick/MiTeenPress, November 4, 2025).
Felice Frankelis a renowned science photographer and MIT research scientist. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Newsweek, Nature, and Scientific American, she is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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