Contributor to the October 2024 issue of Scientific American

Contributors Scientific AmericanOctober 2024 issue

Alison Parshall

Gel Soap
The fate of the hybrid chickadee

During the first web boom, Jerl Thorpe took a job writing code but didn’t quite know how. He practiced by making art in software programs, and in the process developed a passion for translating numbers into compelling visualizations. A data artist, Thorpe enjoys taking information from the page and the screen into people’s lives by creating physical sculptures and installations, capturing immigration statistics and melting glaciers.

But lately Thorpe’s work has been all about birds. Like many, he became an avid birdwatcher during the COVID-19 lockdown. Even living in Brooklyn, New York, he says, “there’s hardly a moment when I don’t spot a bird.” In this issue’s feature, author Rebecca Heisman writes about hybrid tits, and Thorpe has mapped the hybrid’s changing range. He believes his two loves, birdwatching and data, are fundamentally linked, and he is currently teaching birdwatching classes and writing a book called “A Birding Journey.” We were counting birds“Birdwatchers are fundamentally data collectors,” he says. Even those who don’t add their observations to community science repositories are avid observers of behavioral data. Birdwatching, he says, “helps us learn how to notice the natural world.”

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Elizabeth Swoda
Empathy incentives

Throughout her career as a science journalist, Elizabeth Svoboda has wrestled with the big questions: “Why do we follow our best instincts in some situations and our worst instincts in others?” she asks. Svoboda explored this question in her first book, published in 2013. What is a hero?which is about why some people are willing to sacrifice for others. And in this month’s cover story, she delves into the science of empathy. As an idea, empathy “sounds great,” she says, but it can be hard to put into practice, especially when dealing with people who disagree with you on fundamental points. “My instinct is to get defensive and stick to my opinion, to defend it at all costs,” Svoboda says. She wanted to know, “Is there a way to not only teach empathy, but to foster it?”

While covering the case, she found her answer: People are more likely to have empathy when they are surrounded by an empathetic community. She traveled from her home in California’s Bay Area to an elementary school in Los Angeles where parents and teachers are taking part in a program to intentionally cultivate empathy. “It’s a living experiment,” she says. And it was unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. Lord of the FliesShe recalls an experience she had in elementary school decades ago: “The environment is changing, and I really feel hopeful.”

Roxanne Scott
Living with Sickle Cell Disease

Roxanne Scott was a social worker in her first career and a teacher in her second. She taught in Costa Rica, Mexico and China. Inspired by the African immigrants she met in each country, she started a travel blog about the Black experience around the world, which sparked her third and current career as a journalist.

Scott lived in Ghana for a year while transitioning to journalism, but because of frequent power outages, she listened to the news mainly on the radio. This led her to become a radio reporter focusing on the impact of climate change on immigrant communities. In 2021, Scott moved to Queens, New York City, just before Hurricane Ida caused deadly flooding in New York City, especially affecting vulnerable populations. Since then, she has been immersed in reporting on the ongoing flooding in these areas.

For this special report, Scott asked people whose lives have been transformed by sickle cell disease to tell their stories in their own words. Gathering first-person perspectives is “my forte as a radio reporter,” she says, and is especially important for understanding what it’s like to live with a disease that causes excruciating pain that often goes unnoticed because of systemic racism. The people who shared their stories “were candid,” Scott says. “I think they really wanted their voices to be heard.”

Ken Brown and Chris Wren
Return to the Moon

Ken Brown and Chris Rehn met while working at an animation studio in Vancouver in the 1990s. Both worked in the background department, Brown on the computer and Rehn with brush and pencil. Their skills always complemented each other, and today the two are partners in work and life, splitting their time between Canada and Nayarit, Mexico. Since 2001, their editorial illustrations (including dozens of covers) have brought a futuristic feel to the magazine. Scientific American“Creating art on the ‘cutting edge’ of science and technology has actually been a great way to continually educate myself,” says Wren. “You have to keep your head up,” adds Brown.

In this month’s cover story, magazine contributor Sarah Scoles covers the Artemis 2 lunar mission, and the two rekindle their longtime shared passion for space exploration. They share a love of the technological optimism of the Space Race and the Star Trek: The Next GenerationThey enjoy using art to explore how humans change space, and how being in space changes humanity. “We’re blessed to be able to make a living from our hobby,” Len says. “A lot of the work we’ve had over the past 23 years is something we would have done anyway.”