CONTRIBUTORS
Sara Chodosh
Assistant Editor Sara Chodosh
earned a B.A. in neurobiology and
philosophy of science at the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, but in her
senior year decided she’d rather ana-
lyze research as a journalist than
perform it herself. She later learned
to express information visually, and
aesthetically, through the coding
language R and Adobe Illustrator.
For her feature on page 64, she parsed
the data to explain, in screaming
detail, precisely what happens phys-
iologically in infants when they
cry— and how that unmistakable
sound registers in the adult brain.by Sandra GutierrezCOURTESYCONTRIBUTORSEric Nyquist
Much of Eric Nyquist’s artwork
evokes what he calls “apocalyptic
themes.” That’s certainly the case
with his illustration of whales, lob-
sters, and other marine life on
page 38: They represent sea
creatures affected by humanity’s
cacophonous activities on, and
in, the world’s oceans. To create
the fauna, Nyquist—who also
painted satellites and probes on
the walls of NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory— used pen and ink on
paper, then scanned in the images
and digitally added color.Ryan Bradley
For his story on page 66 about
NASA’s Deep Space Network and
the signals it picks up from probes
like Voyager I and II, Ryan Bradley
traveled to the Mojave Desert.
There, he avoided scorpions, rat-
tlesnakes, and biting donkeys to
reach the 230- foot- wide, 3,000-
ton DSS-14 dish—one of the
instruments that pulls in Earth-
bound transmissions. He also
visited the Jet Propulsion Lab near
Pasadena, California, and Voyager
Mission Control. The latter sur-
prised him: “It’s in this building
that I’d driven by a bunch of times
and I never noticed.”Erin Blakemore
The eerie tone emitted by a Russian
shortwave radio station freaks out
Erin Blakemore, who nonetheless
loves reporting on phenomena sci-
ence has yet to solve. The Buzzer, as
the noise is known, is among seven
bizarre rumbles, bumps, and hums
that she explores on page 50. Blake-
more notes that most unexplained
sonic happenings don’t typically re-
main that way for long. “We actually
do have answers for most weird
sounds,” she says, noting that ana-
lytical tools and equipment have
improved over the years—a fact
that makes the persistence of these
enigmas all the more remarkable.8 WINTER 2019 • POPSCI.COM