Contributors to Scientific American’s November 2024 Subject

Contributors to Scientific American’s November 2024 Subject

By Allison Parshall

Duncan Geere and Miriam Fast
Graphic Science

On their podcast, Loud Numbers, Miriam Fast and Duncan Geere (above) flip knowledge into music. There’s a techno observe charting local weather change, a fugue about European paperwork, an experimental epic about beer tasting, and extra. “You get to journey the waves of the info, second to second, in a way more emotionally resonant method” than taking a look at a graph, Geere says.

As knowledge journalists and storytellers, they use each sonification and visualization to make complicated info comprehensible to our ears and eyes. For this difficulty’s column on music evolution, with textual content by affiliate information editor Allison Parshall, Fast and Geere had been challenged to characterize a music as a visible graph. Fast studied music-performance types for her Ph.D. in musicology, so she has expertise utilizing knowledge to “perceive the music otherwise,” as she places it. Geere, who got here to knowledge journalism from an earth sciences background, can be obsessed with music; he DJs and performs in bands.

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Their graphic uncovers and maps key similarities amongst items of conventional music from all around the planet. “It means that music, or music particularly, occupies a steady place throughout cultures,” Fast says—that’s, we people sing for a typical cause.

Luisa Jung
Options for Well being Fairness

Early in her profession as an architect, Luisa Jung realized one thing was lacking. “The world of concepts, of pictures,” was what she liked essentially the most, she says—however not a lot turning these concepts into buildings. Jung had moved from Argentina to Germany and was captivated by the illustrations in her new nation’s newspapers. So she started constructing a portfolio of her work. “At first I used to be sort of afraid to attract, so my model was collage,” she says, however quickly she was dabbling in watercolor after which woodblock printing.

Now an illustrator, Jung lives fortunately on the planet of concepts and metaphor. On this difficulty’s particular report on improvements in well being fairness, her illustrations give type to ideas that may be arduous to visualise, corresponding to cultural competency and knowledge disaggregation, however that nonetheless have actual penalties for individuals’s well being. These sorts of visible metaphors—representations corresponding to an hourglass of mpox and knowledge as a curtain that may obscure actuality—come to her naturally. “It’s the best way my mind works,” she says. Jung goals to “characterize complicated matters in a method that can be sort of poetic.”

Stephani Sutherland
No Extra Needles

Well being journalist Stephani Sutherland has lengthy been fascinated by ache; it was the topic of her Ph.D. analysis. “You’ll be able to’t survive very properly with out it, however if in case you have persistent ache, it will possibly change into actually debilitating,” she says. So when COVID started inflicting painful, long-term sickness and neurological signs, she paid shut consideration. This situation, known as lengthy COVID, is an instance of one thing scientists started to totally perceive solely previously few many years. “The nervous system and the immune system will not be separate like we had been as soon as taught,” Sutherland says.

The connection between persistent ache and the immune system has since sparked her curiosity in immunology. Sutherland’s function on this difficulty explores a sort of needleless vaccine that goes within the nostril, not the arm, and will at some point present higher immunity to infectious illnesses. Nasal vaccines aren’t a actuality for everybody but—“we’re in early days,” Sutherland says. However they could possibly be safer to manage in locations with poorer entry to medical gear and even at dwelling. And since they supply immunology contained in the nostril itself, “you may nip the virus within the bud proper the place your physique encounters it,” she says. “That appears actually highly effective to me.”

Jyoti Madhusoodanan
Defogging Knowledge

Nineteen years in the past Jyoti Madhusoodanan moved from Ahmedabad, India, to Buffalo, N.Y., to finish a Ph.D. in microbiology. That was when she began having to test a field on kinds to point her race—and located that the whole lot of Asia and the Pacific Islands was lumped right into a single class. She remembers considering, “Asia is huge! How is this useful to anybody?” The problem remained on her thoughts for years as she moved from New York to the West Coast and started her profession as a science journalist protecting well being.

As Madhusoodanan lays out in her article for our particular report on improvements in well being fairness, this big class is used on a regular basis in medication and well being analysis—and never solely is it unhelpful, as she initially suspected, however it does hurt. This pooling of knowledge hides essential alerts that could possibly be used to save lots of lives. Lately this apply has lastly begun to vary, a mark of progress that “has been painfully gained by individuals of those communities which were invisible,” Madhusoodanan says. Everybody she spoke with for the story “had a deep, deep private connection to fixing this.”