Contributor to the September 2024 issue of Scientific American

Contributors Scientific AmericanSeptember 2024 issue

Alison Parshall

Beth Zaiken
What was it like to be a dinosaur?

Beth Zaiken (On top of thatZaiken is fascinated by old-fashioned natural history museum exhibits: those that trick sculptures and murals behind glass panels into vast, immersive worlds with visual tricks. “It’s a totally magical illusion,” she says. “It’s like a painting has come to life.” Now Zaiken is designing similar murals for museum exhibits, featuring dinosaurs, mammoths, and other prehistoric animals. This month’s cover story is about evolutionary biologist Amy M. Baranov and paleontologist Daniel T. Ksepka’s depiction of the world of dinosaurs. T. rex and Triceratops In life.

Zaiken enjoys the challenge of depicting bygone eras: “I have to imagine the Earth at different times and transport myself there.” She lives on the backwaters of the Mississippi River in Minnesota and describes herself as a “complete aquatic person.” She loves fishing, canoeing, and kayaking. The river is teeming with catfish, and she also keeps these native freshwater fish as pets in a 125-gallon aquarium. In addition, she also keeps four dogs and two snakes. “I’d love anything that moves if I was given the chance,” says Zaiken.

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Alec Rune
From nothing

Alec Rune has lived in Russia for nearly a decade, working as a news correspondent. He’s traveled all over the country, covering everything from politics to sports to science. One of his first climate stories was about how melting permafrost was destroying Arctic cities. He later wrote about towns taken over by polar bears and reindeer herders displaced by the oil industry. His time in Russia made it clear to him that climate change is “the big story of our time,” says Rune, who is now a freelance climate journalist based in the UK.

For this issue’s feature, Loon traveled to California, Texas and Louisiana to tour current and future direct air capture (DAC) plant sites. The technology holds promise for absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and preparing it for geological sequestration, but it is costly. And its use raises significant ethical questions that make the technology “highly controversial,” says Loon. “Could DAC help us make up for the last billion tons of carbon dioxide we emit and save the world?₂Or will it simply perpetuate the fossil fuel industry that we all depend so heavily on today?”

Veronica Falconieri Hayes
A new type of painkiller

Medical illustrator Veronica Falconieri Hayes specializes in both the incredibly complex and the incredibly tiny. “Molecular biology is my specialty,” she says. Ever since studying biology at university, she’s loved peering through powerful microscopes to see the molecules and structures that form the basis of life. “It’s easy to get lost in all this complexity,” she says. “You just want to keep looking.”

With each project, Hayes learns about a new area of ​​science and strives to condense that information into a visual representation that “makes sense to[readers]of what I’ve learned.” In this month’s new painkiller feature, written by science journalist Marla Broadfoot, Hayes explains how ion channels enable nerves to fire, and how sodium channel blockers can target them to stop pain at its source.

When Hayes worked in the National Cancer Institute’s Cell Biology Laboratory from 2014 to 2018, scientists were still trying to understand the structure of these ion channels, so she was particularly interested in learning how new drugs could target them. “I’m really, really hopeful that these (new drugs) will help a lot of people who have pain in their daily lives,” Hayes says.

Lydia Denworth
Improves with age

In high school and college, Lydia Denworth majored in history and English. “I took minimal science classes,” she says. But in her career as a journalist, she often covered health-related topics. Her first book, published in 2009, followed the scientists who discovered the toxic effects of lead. “I was really proud of it,” she says. From there, Denworth dove deeper into science reporting, often focusing on neuroscience. “The science felt important. It felt like a story worth telling.” In the end, her lack of prior knowledge was an advantage, allowing her to ask better questions and explore better explanations.

Currently a contributing editor Scientific AmericanDenworth divides her time between Brooklyn and her family’s farm in Central New York. In her Science of Health column, she writes about new and interesting science that answers questions readers have about their health. In this issue, she dispels the widely held myth that cognitive decline is inevitable with age. “There’s really just a cultural stereotype that everyone experiences cognitive decline as they age,” Denworth says. But in reality, “Most people who have healthy brains experience very little cognitive decline.”