\n<\/p>\n
September 16, 2025<\/p>\n
4 min read<\/p>\n
Contributors to Scientific American\u2019s October 2025 Issue<\/p>\n
Writers, artists, photographers and researchers share the stories behind the stories<\/p>\n
Chris Gunn
The Lives of Dead Trees<\/p>\n
For almost 25 years Chris Gunn (above) worked as a contract photographer for NASA, where he shot precious objects such as moon rocks brought back from the first Apollo landing and, as lead photographer for the project, captured three years of the James Webb Space Telescope\u2019s construction. That often meant working in clean rooms, with their rigid protocols and highly controlled conditions. So when Gunn entered the dense forests of Oregon to take pictures for journalist Stephen Ornes\u2019s story about a long-term study of decaying logs, it was an entirely different experience. \u201cHaving shot in locations with such stark geometric patterns for so long, going into the forest, initially I was like, \u2018Oh, my gosh, some of the trees are not straight,\u2019\u201d he says, laughing. \u201cThey are messing up my photograph!\u201d<\/p>\n
Gunn, who has lived in the Washington, D.C., area most of his life, had been seeking assignments that would both bring him closer to nature and communicate environmental change. \u201cIn so much of my previous work, I\u2019ve been an outsider looking in on something, and this time I was really inside it,\u201d he says. Gunn likes his images to be super sharp, so he observed how light was falling through the canopy; controlling the exposure gave depth to his photographs. Although the subject was dead trees, \u201cthere was still so much life,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was magical from an imagery perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n
Cassandra Willyard
Decoding Blood<\/p>\n
Alzheimer\u2019s disease has touched almost everyone\u2019s life in some way, says freelance journalist Cassandra Willyard, whose article in this issue\u2019s special report on Alzheimer\u2019s is about a recently approved diagnostic blood test for the disease. \u201cIt\u2019s a complicated subject because there\u2019s still controversy in the field about how it should be used correctly,\u201d she says. But Willyard, who has worked as a science writer for two decades, deliberately pursues stories with a lot of complexity. Sorting through nuance and presenting clear takeaways to readers is a satisfying challenge. For her entire career, \u201cI\u2019ve been very focused on medical topics like drug development and infectious diseases because I find it so fascinating and so relevant to what everyone goes through.\u201d<\/p>\n
Watching federal funding for research get dismantled has been especially dismaying to Willyard because she\u2019s reported on the long trajectories of certain tests and treatments, such as the development of gene therapies and a possible vaccine for Lyme disease. \u201cBut talking to scientists helps me stay engaged and hopeful for the future,\u201d she says, \u201cbecause they are excited about what they are learning.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lauren N. Wilson
The Dawn of Polar Bird Migration<\/p>\n
\u201cMost kids go through a dinosaur stage,\u201d says paleobiologist Lauren N. Wilson. \u201cI just never grew out of it.\u201d Wilson co-authored a feature with Daniel T. Ksepka in this issue about their discovery of the oldest known evidence for polar migration in birds. She says she found it fun to write about their research for a popular audience because she finally got to talk about what delighted her most: \u201cThe baby-bird fossils were so cute. Most of the bones I worked on were two millimeters or smaller.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Wilson, who is now a Ph.D. student at Princeton University, went to Alaska for graduate school, she thought she\u2019d spend her first summer identifying and describing bird fossils alongside Ksepka. \u201cWe started to get a good sense that some of this stuff was pretty significant,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI e-mailed [Ksepka] nonstop for the next three years, saying, \u2018Wow, this is weird, look at this, what do you think?\u2019\u201d The result of their fieldwork was a \u201cholistic study not just of the birds but of the whole ecosystem,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Stories like this one are important, Wilson says, because we wouldn\u2019t be able to understand how abnormal the rate of global warming is today if we didn\u2019t know how things happened in the past. \u201cWe learned that birds have been nesting in the same area in Alaska for 73 million years,\u201d she says. \u201cThen humans show up, and in the blink of an eye we\u2019re endangering that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rebecca Gelernter
The Dawn of Polar Bird Migration<\/p>\n
Illustrator Rebecca Gelernter loves doing paleoart, \u201cand I don\u2019t get to do it very often,\u201d she says. For this issue, she illustrated 10 ancient birds for a cladogram in the feature by Lauren N. Wilson and Daniel T. Ksepka about the dawn of bird migration. As Gelernter talks about skeletal reconstructions, it\u2019s easy to feel her joy at bringing fossil birds back to life. \u201cI really like A Field Guide to Mesozoic Birds and Other Winged Dinosaurs [by Matthew P. Martyniuk] because it\u2019s structured like a bird guide, with notes on proportion and wingspan,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Gelernter has been a \u201cbird person\u201d since she was 10 years old, and she studied ornithology in college. Then she discovered science illustration and enrolled in a graduate program, \u201cwhich was one of the best decisions I\u2019ve ever made.\u201d<\/p>\n
The most fun part of the work is when Gelernter gets to problem-solve the gaps in knowledge, such as by designing plumage colors for dinosaurs. \u201cI like adding a little crest here, some fun soft tissue there,\u201d she says. \u201cBirds are just weird. They have all kinds of bizarre display structures, so it\u2019s hard to come up with something that\u2019s really unreasonable.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you enjoyed this article, I\u2019d like to ask for your support. Scientific American<\/span> has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been a Scientific American<\/span> subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. SciAm <\/span>always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too.<\/p>\n If you subscribe to Scientific American<\/span>, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.<\/p>\n In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can’t-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world’s best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription.<\/p>\n There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you\u2019ll support us in that mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" September 16, 2025 4 min read Contributors to Scientific American\u2019s October 2025 Issue Writers, artists, photographers and researchers share the stories behind the stories By Jen Schwartz Chris GunnThe Lives of Dead Trees For almost 25 years Chris Gunn (above) worked as a contract photographer for NASA, where he shot precious objects such as moon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22097,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[540,10144,580,4958,2477],"class_list":{"0":"post-22096","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-americans","9":"tag-contributors","10":"tag-issue","11":"tag-october","12":"tag-scientific"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}