Scientific American November 2024 Contributor

contributor scientific americanNovember 2024 issue

Written by Alison Parshall

Duncan Gear and Miriam Quick
graphic science

In their podcast, loud numbersMiriam Quick and Duncan Gear (On top of that) convert data to music. There’s a techno track charting climate change, a fugue about European bureaucracy, and an experimental epic about beer tasting. “You can ride the wave of data from moment to moment in a way that is much more emotionally resonant than looking at a graph,” Geer says.

As data journalists and storytellers, they use both sonification and visualization to make complex information comprehensible to our ears and eyes. For this issue’s column on the evolution of music, written by deputy news editor Alison Parshall, Quick and Gere take on the challenge of representing songs as visual graphs. Quick studied music performance styles for his Ph.D. With a degree in musicology, she has experience using data to “understand music in a different way.” Geer, who came to data journalism from a background in geosciences, also has a passion for music. He is a DJ and plays in a band.

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Their graphics reveal and map important similarities in traditional music across the globe. “This suggests that music, especially songs, has a stable place across cultures,” says Quick. In other words, we humans sing for a common reason.

louisa jung
Solutions for health equity

Early in her career as an architect, Louisa Jung realized that something was missing. The “world of ideas and images” was what she loved most, she says, but she didn’t really like turning those ideas into buildings. Jung immigrated to Germany from Argentina and was fascinated by the illustrations that appeared in his new country’s newspapers. So she started building a portfolio of her work. “My style was collage because I was a little scared of painting at first,” she says, but she soon started dabbling in watercolors and then woodblock prints.

Now an illustrator, Jung lives happily in a world of ideas and metaphors. In this issue’s special report on innovations in health equity, her illustrations bring to life concepts that are difficult to visualize but still have real impacts on people’s health, such as cultural competency and data disaggregation. is given. These kinds of visual metaphors come naturally to her, like the hourglass in MPX or data as a curtain obscuring reality. “That’s how my brain works,” she says. Jung aims to “express complex topics in a way that is also kind of poetic.”

Stephanie Sutherland
No more needles

Health journalist Stephanie Sutherland has long been fascinated by pain. It was the subject of her Ph.D. the study. “You can’t live without pain, but chronic pain can be really debilitating,” she says. So when the coronavirus started causing painful, long-term illness and neurological symptoms, she took extreme caution. This condition, called long-term coronavirus, is an example of something that scientists have only begun to fully understand in recent decades. “The nervous system and the immune system are not separate as we were once taught,” Sutherland says.

Since then, the relationship between chronic pain and the immune system sparked her interest in immunology. Sutherland’s feature in this issue looks at needleless vaccines, which are injected into the nose rather than the arm, and could one day boost immunity against infectious diseases. Nasal vaccines aren’t yet a reality for everyone, and “we’re still in the early stages,” Sutherland said. But it could be administered more safely in places where access to medical equipment is inadequate or at home. And because it provides immune function within the nose itself, “the body can nip the virus in the bud the moment it encounters it,” she says. “That seems like a really powerful thing to me.”

Jyoti Madhusudhanan
Anti-fog data

Nineteen years ago, Jyoti Madhusudhanan moved from Ahmedabad, India to Buffalo, New York to pursue her Ph.D. in microbiology. That’s when she had to check a box on a form to indicate her race, and discovered that all of Asian and Pacific Islander were lumped into a single category. She remembers thinking, “Asia is so big!” How does this help anyone?” The question stayed with her for years, even as she moved from New York to the West Coast and began her career as a science journalist covering health.

As Madhusudhanan explains in her special report article on innovations in health equity, this huge category is used all the time in medical and health research, and is simply not as useful as she originally suspected. not cause any harm. This pool of data hides critical signals that can be used to save lives. In recent years, this practice has finally begun to change, a sign of progress “painfully won by people in invisible communities,” Madhusudhanan said. The people she spoke to for this story all “had very deep personal connections to solving problems.”