Contributors to Scientific American’s September 2024 Problem

Contributors to Scientific American’s September 2024 Problem

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 tips to make sculptures and murals behind a glass panel really feel like expansive, immersive worlds. “It’s a totally magical illusion,” she says. “It’s like the painting coming alive.” Immediately 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: you need to “imagine Earth in different time periods and transport yourself there.” She lives in Minnesota on a again channel of the Mississippi River and describes herself as a “totally aquatic creature”—one who loves fishing, canoeing and kayaking. The river is house to an abundance of catfish, and he or she additionally retains these native freshwater fish as pets in her 125-gallon aquarium. And she or he has 4 canine and two snakes. “If you give me half a chance, I will fall in love with anything that moves,” 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 all around the nation, reporting on every part from politics to sports activities to science. One in every of his first local weather tales was on how thawing permafrost is destroying Arctic cities. Later, he wrote a few 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 big story of our era,” says Luhn, who’s now a contract local weather journalist based mostly in England.

For his function story on this situation, 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 expensive. Its use can be loaded with necessary moral questions, which makes the tech “extremely contentious,” Luhn says. “Is DAC going to save the world by helping us compensate for those last few billion tons of CO₂, or is it just going to perpetuate the fossil-fuel industry that we’re all so heavily reliant on today?”

Veronica Falconieri Hays
A New Kind of Ache Tablet

As a medical illustrator, Veronica Falconieri Hays makes a speciality of each the very difficult and the very small. “Molecular biology is my jam,” she says. Ever since finding out biology in school, she has beloved to look via highly effective microscopes on the molecules and constructions that underpin life. “It’s easy to get lost in” these complicated worlds, she says. “You just kind of want to keep looking.”

For each undertaking, Hays learns a few new space of science and tries to wrangle that info into a visible illustration that may “bring [you] along to learn what I just learned.” On this month’s function on new ache drugs, written by science journalist Marla Broadfoot, Hays illustrated how ion channels permit nerves to fireside—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 had been nonetheless attempting to know the construction of those ion channels. So she was significantly to learn the way new medication are capable of goal them. “I’m really, really hopeful that these [new medications] are going to help a lot of people who deal with pain in their everyday life,” Hays says.

Lydia Denworth
Bettering with Age

In highschool and school, Lydia Denworth was extra of a historical past and English particular person—“I took the minimum amount of science classes possible,” she says. But in her profession as a journalist, she usually discovered herself masking health-related subjects. Her first e-book, printed in 2009, adopted the scientists who uncovered the poisonous results of lead. “I was really proud of it,” she says. From there Denworth started to delve extra into science reporting, usually with a give attention to neuroscience. “Science felt important. It felt like stories worth 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 attention-grabbing science that solutions questions readers could have about their very own well being. On this situation, she dispels the pervasive fable that getting older at all times comes with cognitive decline. “There’s just this real cultural stereotype that everybody declines cognitively as they age,” Denworth says. However in actuality, “if you have a healthy brain, many people don’t decline almost at all.”