Scientific American December 2024 Contributor

contributor scientific americanDecember 2024 issue

Written by Alison Parshall

thomas hooks
progress

Illustrator Thomas Fuchs (On top of that) The more bizarre the assignment, the better. For over 10 years his illustrations have been scientific american I have been depicting strange scientific discoveries that cannot be captured in photographs. This month, he took on the challenge of inventing visuals for quantum entanglement, fungal robots, and sound. The magazine’s news section, Advances, is “not very picturesque, and that’s why I love it,” he says. “When you don’t have images in your head, you’re pretty free and you can go completely wild.” See also the drawing Fuchs drew for the Science Agenda on Book Banning.

Fuchs has long had an artistic bent. “I always drew the AC/DC logo on my jean jackets at school, thinking I could draw straight lines,” he jokes. He started attending art school for graphic design, but quickly realized he could focus on illustration. “Straight lines look great visually, but it’s nice to include a curve once in a while.” For Fuchs, illustrations are about looking deeper into the science behind a story and going beyond the content of the article itself to “ask other questions.” is to select an image that causes

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“The way we think about the ancient relationship between horses is the very reality on the ground for people today.” —William T. Taylor, archaeozoologist and author

William T. Taylor
When a horse becomes a horse

Growing up in Montana, William T. Taylor lived in a house “with every imaginable cowboy cultural trappings,” he says. “For fancy occasions, I’d wear cowboy boots, a bolo hat, and a hat.” His grandfather was a rancher, but his own father was a lawyer, so he didn’t keep animals. Then, after college, Taylor spent a summer doing archeological research in Mongolia, another place with a “very vibrant horse culture.” While helping to excavate a 2,500-year-old horse burial site, “I had so many questions about human-horse interaction that I just couldn’t answer.”

Taylor eventually became an archaeozoologist and recently published a book called. hoof beat (University of California Press, 2024). This issue tells the story of the domestication of horses and their spread throughout the ancient world. These discoveries inform our understanding of both the past and present, shape conservation strategies for Earth’s last wild horse species native to Central Asia, and explore the long history of indigenous peoples with horses in America’s Great Plains. I support it. “The way we think about the ancient relationship with horses is very much the reality on the ground for people today,” Taylor says.

violet francis
Tessellation Revelation

as assistant art director scientific american In the 1990s, Violet Francis became fascinated with old issues from the 1950s and 1960s. “The design was very clear and focused,” she says. In an era of hectic 3D illustrations, she has become obsessed with simplicity. Her favorite illustration she created was a two-page spread for a 1998 article about fundamental particles called gluons. That’s one eye-catching Feynman diagram. These stripped-down graphics “look like scientific hieroglyphics,” she says. “I was shocked by their beauty.”

Today, Francis still aims to find the simplest way to express abstract scientific truths. In this issue’s feature on science writer Elise Katz’s new class of shapes, “I tried to approach the illustrations to make geometry sing,” she says. Frances is also an accomplished artist, and her multimedia works often focus on the human form. Her art has completely changed since coming out as a trans woman five years ago. “With that moment of disorienting joy, I realized that a large part of my art was trying to create my own golem,” she says. After that, “I became more interested in the confusion of existence itself.” In 2023, she held her first solo exhibition since coming out as transgender. “For me, life is an experiment,” says Francis. “That’s how I want to live.”