Contributors to Scientific American’s November 2024 Problem

Contributors to Scientific American’s November 2024 Problem

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 forms, an experimental epic about beer tasting, and extra. “You get to ride the waves of the data, moment to moment, in a much more emotionally resonant way” 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 situation’s column on music evolution, with textual content by affiliate information editor Allison Parshall, Fast and Geere have been challenged to symbolize a tune as a visible graph. Fast studied music-performance types for her Ph.D. in musicology, so she has expertise utilizing knowledge to “understand the music in a different way,” as she places it. Geere, who got here to knowledge journalism from an earth sciences background, can also 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 suggests that music, or song specifically, occupies a stable position across 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 ideas, of images,” 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 was kind of afraid to draw, so my style was collage,” she says, however quickly she was dabbling in watercolor after which woodblock printing.

Now an illustrator, Jung lives fortunately on the earth of concepts and metaphor. On this situation’s particular report on improvements in well being fairness, her illustrations give type to ideas that may be exhausting 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 way my brain works,” she says. Jung goals to “represent complex topics in a way that is also kind 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 can’t survive very well without it, but if you have chronic pain, it can become really debilitating,” she says. So when COVID started inflicting painful, long-term sickness and neurological signs, she paid shut consideration. This situation, referred to as lengthy COVID, is an instance of one thing scientists started to totally perceive solely up to now few many years. “The nervous system and the immune system are not separate like we were once taught,” Sutherland says.

The connection between persistent ache and the immune system has since sparked her curiosity in immunology. Sutherland’s function on this situation explores a sort of needleless vaccine that goes within the nostril, not the arm, and will sooner or later present higher immunity to infectious ailments. Nasal vaccines aren’t a actuality for everybody but—“we’re in early days,” Sutherland says. However they might be safer to manage in locations with poorer entry to medical gear and even at house. And since they supply immunology contained in the nostril itself, “you can nip the virus in the bud right where your body encounters it,” she says. “That seems really powerful to me.”

Jyoti Madhusoodanan
Defogging Information

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 verify a field on kinds to point her race—and located that everything of Asia and the Pacific Islands was lumped right into a single class. She remembers considering, “Asia is massive! How is this helpful to anyone?” 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 overlaying well being.

As Madhusoodanan lays out in her article for our particular report on improvements in well being fairness, this large 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 indicators that might be used to avoid wasting lives. Lately this follow has lastly begun to vary, a mark of progress that “has been painfully won by people of these communities that have been invisible,” Madhusoodanan says. Everybody she spoke with for the story “had a deep, deep personal connection to fixing this.”