One of the biggest mysteries of the universe is why there is a universe at all. According to particle physics, the big bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and they should have immediately canceled each other out. But here we are! We're lucky enough to exist, and we get to live in a time when fundamental questions can be asked and potentially answered scientifically. Physicist Luke Caldwell narrates how he and his colleagues made the most precise measurement ever of a property of electrons that could help explain the existence of everything.
It's tempting to think that our big old human brains are uniquely able to learn, store information, and use know-how to make decisions and solve problems. But bizarrely, recent research suggests that even rudimentary clumps of nonbrain cells—from the skin or the heart, for instance—can remember experiences and act on their knowledge. This work is leading to new ideas about the evolutionary origins of intelligence, as author Rowan Jacobsen writes. The field, called basal cognition, is full of startling examples that may change how you think about thinking.
The clock is ticking toward a time when quantum computers will be able to hack today's most common and sophisticated security systems. The clock has a name, the Y2Q clock, and the projected date when we'll no longer be able to shop safely online or share encoded messages securely is April 14, 2030 (but that's just a rough guess). The National Institute of Standards and Technology challenged inventors a few years ago to come up with “quantum-resistant” cryptography. Mathematician and writer Kelsey Houston-Edwards discusses how the winners of that contest propose using lattice mathematics and other strategies to keep today's secrets safe from tomorrow's quantum computers.
Do you remember the first time you saw a faint band of stars across the sky and realized that was the Milky Way? No matter how many times you notice it, it's awesome to know you're seeing our own spiral galaxy from within. That sight might be a little more awesome after reading author Ann Finkbeiner's description of unprecedented star-tracking projects that have generated a new map of the Milky Way. Our galaxy's history turns out to be much more tumultuous and chaotic than expected. One astronomer sums up our new view as “the single largest increase in astronomical knowledge in, like, forever.”
Sand mining is a serious and growing environmental threat that has not gotten as much attention as deforestation or overfishing. Most of the sand is used in concrete, and the world is mining it much faster than it can be replenished. Sand dredging disrupts coastlines and rivers, and the industry is full of transnational corruption. Writer David A. Taylor goes inside the world of illegal and (kinda) legal sand mining and shows how investigators are trying to stop the most dangerous practices.
Some of the most dramatic fossil discoveries in the U.S. have been made in the badlands of Montana. Paleontologist Kristina A. Curry Rogers and geologist Raymond R. Rogers take us on their journey to look at some of the humbler—but no less vital—fossil finds: teeth, fish scales, parasites and small bones. They describe in loving detail what it was like to live in the steamy, buzzy, monstrous time of the dinosaurs.
Contributors to Scientific American’s February 2024 Issue
Writers, artists, photographers and researchers share the stories behind the stories
Kristina A. Curry Rogers and Raymond R. Rogers
Lost Worlds of the Dinosaurs
At around six years old, Kristina A. Curry Rogers read a story in a kids' magazine about the discovery of fossilized dinosaur eggs and babies in Montana. She immediately decided to become a paleontologist, and decades later she became a specialist in long-necked dinosaurs, such as sauropods. During a field expedition in Zimbabwe, she met Raymond R. Rogers, a geologist who studies how fossils form. “She fell in love with me,” Ray laughs, and the two got married a few years later.
It turned out that their lines of research were complementary, too. As professors at Macalester College in Minnesota, they work together to uncover the lost worlds of the Cretaceous dinosaurs found in modern-day Montana, which they detail in a feature in this issue. When trying to imagine this bygone, swampy ecosystem, Kristi says, “I think of the soundscape,” with buzzing mosquitoes and the splash of turtles diving off logs. These seaside swamps would be familiar to us, filled with crocodiles, frogs and fish. “If you time traveled there,” Ray says, “you would not know you're in the Cretaceous until you bumped into a dinosaur.”
Federica Fragapane
Cascading Climate Impacts
From vintage books to museum exhibits to nature, Federica Fragapane is a collector of beauty. “If I see something beautiful, I take pictures because I know that I might use it as inspiration.” Being an information designer is the perfect challenge for Fragapane, who once thought that pursuing a career in design meant leaving behind her love of storytelling and science. Her graphics often convey narratives about human rights abuses and climate change. Three of her works, including one on the killings of Brazil's environmental defenders, were recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
For this issue's Graphic Science column, along with writer Lori Youmshajekian, Fragapane, who is based in Turin, Italy, shows how climate events from droughts to hurricanes cascade to cause destruction far beyond their immediate impact. This interconnected web of consequences is vast, and there's no single, simple takeaway. “Oversimplifying these kinds of topics never helps” people understand them, she says. This story of compounding calamities “deserves to be told and visualized in its complexity.”
Ann Finkbeiner
Our Turbulent Galaxy
Since the 1980s science writer Ann Finkbeiner has been covering the cutting edge of cosmology—the big bang, the structure of the universe, the evolution of galaxies. But through it all, “I looked down on our own galaxy,” she says of the Milky Way. “I thought it was just too trivial and, you know, just puny.” After all, what can we extrapolate about the laws of the universe by looking at a single galaxy? But when Scientific American space and physics editor Clara Moskowitz asked Finkbeiner if she wanted to write about recent efforts to map the Milky Way, Finkbeiner was hooked almost immediately. “I thought, ‘I look at the sky every night, and I don't have a clue about what's going on up there!'”
Finkbeiner lives in Baltimore, where her view of the stars is limited, but she grew up in the countryside and remembers her excitement when she realized the hazy line across the night sky was our own galaxy. While reporting on new maps of the Milky Way for this article, she gained a new appreciation for our galactic home: “it's not what we thought it was.”
Mark Smith
Sand Mafias
In his 20s and early 30s Mark Smith held many different jobs. He was a greenkeeper at a golf course, a mail carrier, and an employee in skate and record shops. By his mid-30s he wanted a change—“I didn't really have anything to lose,” he says—and he applied to an illustration program at a university. “It's the only thing I think I could have really poured my heart into,” he says. Now an artist based in Exeter, England, he illustrated this issue's feature article by journalist David A. Taylor on the illegal mining and selling of sand from coasts and rivers. Smith, who has traveled to Morocco's beaches multiple times to surf, was immediately fascinated by the country's “sand mafias” and set out to translate the article into images.
The topic fit well with a shift he's been making in his artistic approach, moving away from more conceptual, abstract work toward narrative illustrations, which tell immersive stories and can be “a bit more weighty,” he says. Smith doesn't try to explain how he decides to depict these visual tales—it's a form of artistic expression that defies words: “That's the magic, for me, and why I enjoy it so much.”