Contributors to Scientific American’s January 2025 Issue

Helpers American scientificJanuary 2025 issue

Who Allison Parshall edited by Jen Schwartz

Doug Gimes
The Next Viral Plague

Photojournalist Doug Gimesy (above) is a type of knowledge about flying foxes. He first photographed a colony of these fuzzy bats eight years ago in Melbourne, Australia, and soon became a rescuer campaigning for bans on certain types of netting and wire that can trap and harm these animals. All this work was being done a few kilometers from his home. “It became a story of urban wildlife,” says Gimesy, whose photography focuses on conservation issues in Australia.

For this issue’s story on bats and viruses, Gimesy traveled to Queensland to photograph flying foxes. He didn’t have to venture far from populated areas to find his subjects; The opening image of the story was captured in a public park. After spotting bats in a tree, he would lie under them waiting for the perfect shot. “I can wait half an hour for them to look down,” he says. Flying foxes are “excellent” but evil mammals. “For me, it’s important to show them in their best light, so I can hopefully get people to fall in love with them,” says Gimesy.

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Nadia Drake
Mission to Europe

The experience of a rocket launch does not translate to television. “It shakes the ground, it shakes the buildings, it shakes you,” says science journalist Nadia Drake, who witnessed the launch of the Europa Clipper mission from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida last October. As a reporter and honoring the legacy of the late father of astronomer Frank Drake, his work influenced the Clipper expedition’s search for life on Jupiter’s icy Europa. Her father’s eponymous equation is engraved on the spaceship’s vault plaque in her handwriting, along with other writings such as a poem by former poet laureate Ada Limón. When project scientist Robert Pappalardo told Nadia about this memory of her father, she was struck by the “beautiful and poignant tribute”. The plaque on the vault, he says, “is just a work of art.”

Nadia has known Pappalardo for more than a decade; In 2011 he announced the project that would become Clipper for the first cover of his magazine. He originally intended to write about the life sciences when he became a journalist—a Ph.D. in genetics, but ultimately developed a specialty in astronomy and the search for life beyond our planet. “We learn so much about life here on Earth” in search of those answers, he says, including by exploring deep-sea hydrothermal vents to learn how organisms survive without sunlight.

The messages we humans send to strangers can also reveal something about us. “Clipper stays in the solar system. It will probably end its mission on Ganymede (Jupiter’s moon), says Nadia. “So those messages aren’t directed at anyone but us.”

Jane Qiu
The Next Viral Plague

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Beijing-based journalist Jane Qiu has been paying close attention to bats. In March 2020, bat virologist Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the first journalist to report to the Western media in an article. American scientificand has been reporting infectious diseases ever since. Through all of this, one question has driven him: why have so many diseases emerged from bats in the last 20 years? What makes these animals special? “I’ve been on this kind of journey, actually, to answer those questions,” he says. For his long article, Qiu tells the story of a bat-borne virus in Australia and what it taught us about the immunity and evolution of flying mammals.

Before becoming a journalist, Qiu spent a decade working as a molecular biologist. It seemed like a logical career path at the time: my mother was a doctor, and my father was a philosopher of science. It was then that he decided to pursue his intense curiosity and love of learning into the field of science journalism.

He started working on Chinese ecology, climate change and development; all these, he has learned, are factors in the spread of infectious diseases, because they leave bats further and further away from their habitats and without resources. This stress can affect their immune system, just like ours, Qiu says. “I started my project asking what is special about mice, and I think what I found fascinating is that they are not so different from us.”

Michelle Carr
Engineering our dreams

While working in a university sleep lab, Michelle Carr began having lucid dreams. It happened naturally – “he slept very badly because it was university”, and one night he noticed that he was dreaming. “The first one was very eye-opening, and I started reading everything I could about the subject,” says Carr. Sleep science is a major field, but at the time few laboratories studied dreams and nightmares specifically; Carr joined the Ph.D. “It’s quite surprising how neglected dreams are,” he says. “These are real experiences.”

Dreams, scientists are learning, are more under control than we realize. In his feature article, Carr shares how he and other researchers are helping people engineer dreams to treat nightmares and PTSD. It’s “incredible” how the mind can instantly produce “a completely vivid and detailed simulation,” he says. “It shows something really impressive about the mind.”