iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 15h

Jonathan Keats photographed at The Interval at the @longnow.org Artist, philosopher, and professional provocateur, Keats has spent years making us think differently about time, technology, civilization, and what it means to be human.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 16h

A delight working with Nobel laureate David Baker on this portrait. David leads the Institute for Protein Design at UW, imagining proteins nature never made and what they might make possible. Delighted to see the portrait on the cover of The Biologist. explorers.com/david-baker⁠

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 28/09/2026

John Dabiri studies the physics of motion, from jellyfish and schooling fish to wind turbines and the human heart. A Caltech engineer, MacArthur Fellow and National Medal of Science recipient, finding engineering ideas hidden in nature. explorers.com/john-dabiri/ @nationalacademies.org @caltech.edu

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Reposted by Christopher Michel

jenna newman phd @jennanewman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

“A scientist is not a lab coat. A scientist is a whole human being carrying curiosity, history, taste, ambition, doubt, discipline, contradiction.”🧪 @zernickagoetz.bsky.social @christophermichel.com

Scientist [Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz] rocking it

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Reposted by Christopher Michel

Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz @zernickagoetz.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Such a pleasure to meet you, Chris! And a fun challenge to show scientists without the lab coat, microscope, and serious scientist stare 😉 to show a fragment of our lives beyond our experiments! I hope we managed to capture a little of the people behind the science.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 27/09/2026

How do we picture a scientist? Lab coat. Microscope. Fluorescent light. Developmental biologist @zernickagoetz.bsky.social wanted to step outside that shorthand. Rigorous and elegant. Exacting and visual. A scientist, yes, but never only that. explorers.com/how-do-we-pi... @nationalacademies.org

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 27/09/2026

Magdalena Żernicka Goetz studies the first moments of life, how cells organize, choose their roles, and begin building an embryo. She sees detail, structure and beauty everywhere. It shows in the science, too. @caltech.edu @nationalacademies.org

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 26/09/2026

Dave Gallagher was weeks from retiring after 36 years at JPL when he was asked to become its 11th director, in one of the lab’s hardest periods. In Dave’s office hangs a photo of his father, a Navy pilot. Different kind of service. Same instinct.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 26/09/2026

John Grotzinger helped lead Curiosity’s search for ancient habitability on Mars. He showed up for our Caltech portrait session on a homemade bicycle carrying a model rover wheel. Perfect. Portrait + story: explorers.com/john-grotzin...

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 24/09/2026

Keyur Patel has spent more than 40 years turning distant worlds into destinations, helping guide Voyager, Deep Impact and Dawn. I photographed him at JPL beside the spacecraft he helped save. @nationalacademies.org explorers.com/keyur-patel/

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 24/09/2026

Keeping the Voyagers alive has become an extraordinary act of engineering care. Their power comes from the heat of decaying plutonium, and each spacecraft loses about four watts every year. JPL's Suzanne Dodd and Kareem Badaruddin are helping make those choices. More: explorers.com/keeping-voya...

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 24/09/2026

.@rpappalardo.bsky.social leads Europa Clipper science at NASA JPL. An ocean waits. More: explorers.com/robert-pappa... @nationalacademies.org

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 24/09/2026

Autumn Lui is helping direct one of JPL’s audacious ideas: MoonFall, a proposed mission using rocket powered drones to leap across the lunar South Pole, map future Artemis terrain, and search permanently shadowed craters for water ice. explorers.com/autumn-lui @nationalacademies.org

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 21/09/2026

Somewhere beyond the familiar, the world loses its edges. Union Glacier, Antarctica.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 21/09/2026

Nobel laureate Carol Greider moved to Santa Cruz, took up surfing, and became a beginner again. I love that. She discovered telomerase. Now she is learning the Pacific. Portrait from the New Heroes project. explorers.com/carol-greider/ @nationalacademies.org

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 20/09/2026

George Church once said, “It’s all too easy to dismiss the future. People confuse what’s impossible today with what’s impossible tomorrow." A pioneer of genomics, synthetic biology, and genome engineering, always working a few steps ahead. explorers.com/george-church/ @nationalacademies.org

explorers.com

New Heroes: George Church

Dr. George Church is a geneticist, molecular engineer, and visionary whose work continually reshapes the landscape of biotechnology. A professor at Harvard and MIT, he has been at the forefront of …

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 19/09/2026

“I can get focused and persevere, that’s what I can do.” -Katalin Karikó Years of rejected grants. Work that helped make mRNA vaccines possible. A Nobel Prize. My portrait of a woman who kept going, and her story: explorers.com/katalin-kari... @nationalacademies.org

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 19/09/2026

The geometry of getting somewhere. Bay Bridge, San Francisco.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 18/09/2026

“I have been a telescope builder all my life. Since I was about eight years old, I have wanted to know how did we get here.” - John Mather His Nobel Prize winning work on COBE helped reveal the afterglow of the Big Bang with extraordinary precision @nationalacademies.org explorers.com/john-mather/

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 18/09/2026

The strange thing is how thin it feels from up there. A ribbon of roadway, a few lanes of traffic, cold green water on both sides, and nothing between you and the scale of it all but steel, fog, and a long way down.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 17/09/2026

"In the long run, curiosity-driven research just works better... Real breakthroughs come from people focusing on what they're excited about." - Geoffrey Hinton More: explorers.com/geoffrey-hin... @nationalacademies.org

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 17/09/2026

Courage under fire. For more than half a century, Tony Fauci kept showing up for some of the hardest problems in medicine and public health. Steadiness matters. So does endurance. Dr. Anthony Fauci.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 16/09/2026

@francesarnold.bsky.social is that rare intersection of extraordinary accomplishment and genuine kindness. Nobel Prize. Pioneering scientist. Engineer. And somehow, still deeply generous, curious, and human. @nationalacademies.org

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 16/09/2026

Kip Thorne spent decades thinking about black holes, warped spacetime, and gravitational waves, ideas that once seemed almost beyond observation. Then LIGO detected two black holes colliding 1.3 billion light years away. New Heroes: explorers.com/kip-thorne/ @nationalacademies.org

explorers.com

New Heroes: Kip Thorne

Kip Thorne’s home in the hills of Linda Vista, Pasadena, felt like an observatory of the mind, a place where the boundaries between mathematics, physics, and imagination blurred. When I photographe…

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 14/09/2026

We owe everything to our sun. Every forest. Every ocean current. Every breath. Nearly every calorie of energy that has ever passed through a living thing began here, in the light of a star 93 million miles away. And every evening, it disappears over the horizon as if this were ordinary. #Photography

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 13/09/2026

H₂O + NaCl + N₂ + O₂ + H₂O(g) + hν = the last light of the day dissolving into the Pacific. Sea Ranch. Hasselblad X2D II.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 10/09/2026

An old portrait of my friend Nick Bilton, made in San Francisco back in 2014. A lot has happened since then. He’s taking on something altogether different: executive producer of 60 Minutes, charged with helping shape the next chapter of one of the great institutions in American journalism.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 10/09/2026

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” - Marcel Proust

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 07/09/2026

Mysterious signals from the edge of the world. Antennas pointed into the Arctic sky. Somewhere, someone is always listening. Isfjord Radio, Svalbard.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 07/09/2026

When simply being English isn’t quite English enough. Oxford. #Leica

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 07/09/2026

From the cockpit of a U 2 at 70,000 feet, the curve of the Earth stops being an abstraction. The sky above goes black. The horizon bends away beneath you. And for a little while, you are flying where almost nothing else does.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 06/09/2026

Somewhere between a map of the stars and the inside of a machine.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 06/09/2026

“Knowing without seeing is at the heart of chemistry.” -Roald Hoffmann Roald won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981. He has spent much of his life thinking about things we cannot see, atoms and bonds, but also memory, beauty, and morality More: explorers.com/roald-hoffman/ @nationalacademies.org

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 06/09/2026

Before you believe anything, run it through Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit: What’s the evidence? Can it be independently verified? Is there a simpler explanation? What would prove it wrong? Do I believe it because I want it to be true? A pretty good filter for life.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 05/09/2026

Some places make you remember that we were never separate from nature. Standing beneath the redwoods, with sunlight pouring through trees, you can almost feel the world breathing.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 05/09/2026

A bird and its shadow, skimming the cold blue at the edge of the world.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 05/09/2026

How far will you go for the photograph? Apparently, all the way up. #GoldenGateBridge

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 04/09/2026

For a few seconds, she owned the whole damn sky.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 03/09/2026

This photo was an accident. I was nearing 70,000 feet in a U 2, fumbling with the settings on a GoPro I had mounted in the cockpit. I must have hit the shutter button. There are photographs you plan carefully. And then there are the accidental ones that somehow bring you right back.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 02/09/2026

I photographed Malcolm Margolin in 2021. He was 81 then, with that magnificent beard, a room full of books, and a face that seemed incapable of behaving. Malcolm died last year at 84. All those books behind him. All that history. And Malcolm sticking out his tongue at me. That feels about right.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 02/09/2026

She moves through the desert as if the desert dreamed her into being.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 01/09/2026

Mixed Metaphor. Three orcas and a humpback, sharing the same cold water. Different lives. Different languages.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 01/09/2026

Happy 91st birthday to the extraordinary Sylvia Earle. Six decades exploring the ocean, descending into places few humans have ever seen, and fighting like hell for the living planet she loves. What a privilege to make her portrait. More: explorers.com/sylvia-earle @nationalacademies.org

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 31/08/2026

Burning Man is happening again this week. A city rises from the Nevada dust. For a few strange days, the improbable becomes real. Then almost everything disappears. A few photographs from my years on the playa: View my photos at: www.christophermichel.com/Places-2025/...

christophermichel.com

Burning Man Best - Christopher Michel

Christopher Michel Photography

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Reposted by Christopher Michel

Ben de Bivort @debivort.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

I thought this was astrophotography at first.

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 30/08/2026

“The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.” - Anaïs Nin. Santa Fe (2018). #Leica M10

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Christopher Michel @christophermichel.com · 30/08/2026

A lone humpback amidst black water, suspended for a fraction of a second between sea and sky. Forty tons of animal, and still so much we do not understand. #photograohy

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