Contributors to Scientific American’s September 2024 Situation

Contributors to Scientific American’s September 2024 Situation

By Allison Parshall

Beth Zaiken
What Was It Prefer to Be a Dinosaur?

Since childhood, Beth Zaiken (above) has been enamored by old-school pure historical past museum reveals—those that use visible methods to make sculptures and murals behind a glass panel really feel like expansive, immersive worlds. “It’s a completely magical phantasm,” she says. “It’s just like the portray coming alive.” In the present day Zaiken designs related murals for museum reveals, usually that includes dinosaurs, mammoths, or different prehistoric fauna. For this month’s cowl story, written by evolutionary biologist Amy M. Balanoff and paleontologist Daniel T. Ksepka on what it was like being a dinosaur, she introduced the world of a T. rex and a Triceratops to life.

Zaiken enjoys the problem of illustrating bygone eras: it’s a must to “think about Earth in several time durations and transport your self there.” She lives in Minnesota on a again channel of the Mississippi River and describes herself as a “completely aquatic creature”—one who loves fishing, canoeing and kayaking. The river is residence to an abundance of catfish, and he or she additionally retains these native freshwater fish as pets in her 125-gallon aquarium. And he or she has 4 canines and two snakes. “In the event you give me half an opportunity, I’ll fall in love with something that strikes,” Zaiken says.

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Alec Luhn
Out of Skinny Air

For practically a decade Alec Luhn lived and labored in Russia as a information correspondent. He traveled everywhere in the nation, reporting on the whole lot from politics to sports activities to science. Certainly one of his first local weather tales was on how thawing permafrost is destroying Arctic cities. Later, he wrote a couple of city taken over by polar bears and about reindeer herders displaced by the oil trade. His time in Russia made it clear to him that local weather change was “the large story of our period,” says Luhn, who’s now a contract local weather journalist based mostly in England.

For his characteristic story on this subject, Luhn traveled to California, Texas and Louisiana to go to the websites of present and future direct-air-capture (DAC) crops. This expertise guarantees to suck carbon dioxide from the air, leaving it able to be sequestered within the floor, however it’s pricey. Its use can be loaded with necessary moral questions, which makes the tech “extraordinarily contentious,” Luhn says. “Is DAC going to save lots of the world by serving to us compensate for these previous couple of billion tons of CO₂, or is it simply going to perpetuate the fossil-fuel trade that we’re all so closely reliant on right now?”

Veronica Falconieri Hays
A New Kind of Ache Tablet

As a medical illustrator, Veronica Falconieri Hays focuses on each the very difficult and the very small. “Molecular biology is my jam,” she says. Ever since finding out biology in faculty, she has liked to look by highly effective microscopes on the molecules and constructions that underpin life. “It’s simple to get misplaced in” these complicated worlds, she says. “You simply sort of need to preserve trying.”

For each challenge, Hays learns a couple of new space of science and tries to wrangle that info into a visible illustration that can “deliver [you] alongside to study what I simply discovered.” On this month’s characteristic on new ache drugs, written by science journalist Marla Broadfoot, Hays illustrated how ion channels permit nerves to fireplace—and the way sodium channel blockers can goal them to cease ache at its supply.

When Hays labored for the Nationwide Most cancers Institute in a cell biology lab from 2014 to 2018, scientists have been nonetheless attempting to grasp the construction of those ion channels. So she was significantly to learn the way new medicine are capable of goal them. “I’m actually, actually hopeful that these [new medications] are going to assist lots of people who cope with ache of their on a regular basis life,” Hays says.

Lydia Denworth
Bettering with Age

In highschool and faculty, Lydia Denworth was extra of a historical past and English individual—“I took the minimal quantity of science courses doable,” she says. But in her profession as a journalist, she usually discovered herself protecting health-related subjects. Her first e-book, printed in 2009, adopted the scientists who uncovered the poisonous results of lead. “I used to be actually happy with it,” she says. From there Denworth started to delve extra into science reporting, usually with a deal with neuroscience. “Science felt necessary. It felt like tales value telling.” Because it turned out, her lack of prior data was an asset that allowed her to ask higher questions and discover higher explanations.

Now a contributing editor at Scientific American, Denworth splits her time between Brooklyn and her household’s farm in central New York State. In her Science of Well being column, she writes about new or fascinating science that solutions questions readers might have about their very own well being. On this subject, she dispels the pervasive fantasy that growing old at all times comes with cognitive decline. “There’s simply this actual cultural stereotype that everyone declines cognitively as they age,” Denworth says. However in actuality, “in case you have a wholesome mind, many individuals don’t decline nearly in any respect.”