The Scientist November 2019

11.2019 | THE SCIENTIST 9

Growing up in Palmetto, Florida,Nicoletta Lanesedreamed of being a fiction writer. In high school, she

found herself drawn to science. She was also an avid dancer, having performed in a variety of styles since age

four. So she decided to attend the University of Florida (UF), where she could double major in dance and neu-

roscience. There, Lanese’s interests started to collide, as she choreographed dances inspired by scientific illiter-

acy and locked-in syndrome, and blogged about what she was learning in her science classes. In her junior year,

she got the idea of what she might do for a living when a neuroscience professor handed her back an assign-

ment in which she’d summarized a research paper and told her that she would “make a good science writer,”

Lanese recalls. A quick Google search led to her to numerous resources on the profession, and she quickly real-

ized that it bridged her interests in scientific research, writing, and creative forms of communication.

After Lanese graduated from UF in 2017, she enrolled in the University of California, Santa Cruz’s science

communication program, and while there she interned for two university press offices and two local newspa-

pers. She topped it off with a six-month stint as the science communication fellow at the Okinawa Institute of

Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan. In the spring of 2019, Lanese moved back to the US,

and to New York City, where she began freelancing before accepting an internship at The Scientist this sum-

mer. “I was really grateful to get that dual experience of writing usual faster online articles and then more

processed magazine pieces,” Lanese says of her time with the publication. In this issue, find her stories on the

brains of convicted murderers (page 15), the electrical activity of cable bacteria (page 48), and the work of

young researcher Martha Munoz (page 53). In September, she accepted a job as a staff reporter at LiveScience.

Over the past two decades, Richard Smith has scuba dived about 3,600 times in the waters off of six con-

tinents. But growing up in the Cotswolds in rural England, his first dives were with his father in cold Brit-

ish waters. “It was not very much fun, I’ll be honest,” he tells The Scientist. “[It] almost put us completely

off the whole idea.” But he became hooked on the pastime once he visited the Great Barrier Reef, and

ever since, he’s been photographing underwater life and documenting animal behavior. He did his PhD

research at the University of Queensland in Australia on pygmy seahorse biology, and now leads marine

expeditions for experienced divers.

His first book, The World Beneath: The Life and Times of Unknown Sea Creatures and Coral Reefs, was

released in September, and it showcases the diversity and history of underwater life. “There’s just so much

more to the oceans than people realize, and I wanted to bring that to people’s attention,” he says. He’s hoping

that by increasing awareness and appreciation of marine life, he can help protect it. On page 60 of this issue,

he writes about his undersea observations.

Mark Colyvan, a philosopher at the University of Sydney in Australia with a particular interest in science, is

currently focused on exploring the similarities and differences between different branches of physical and life

sciences. He and his colleagues, University of California, Santa Barbara, ecologist John Damuth and retired

theoretical ecologist Lev Ginzburg, are on a mission to raise awareness of the importance of making ecology a

bit more like physics and mathematics. As the trio writes on page 20, the search for universal laws that under-

gird ecology is a controversial, but potentially game-changing, quest.

The three researchers posit that the curious correlations discovered by allometry, the study of how the

characteristics of living creatures scale with body size, are keys to establishing ecological laws. For example,

whether measuring elephants or mice, a given area of land will support the same absolute amount of metab-

olism exhibited by the organisms within it. “ Yo u might think of these as a different kind of l a w,” Colyvan says,

“like a law as yet to be underwritten by the big theory.” A debate still ensues among researchers as to whether

or not ecology can be described by overarching laws, with some scientists opining that biology is simply too

complex for such an organization. “So the thought is that there are no perfect laws, in the sense that they per-

fectly describe biological systems,” Colyvan says. “But it seems to us that that’s putting too much emphasis on

the noise and not enough on the correlations.”

NOVEMBER 2019

Contributors

ANDREW SCOTT; DARREN JEW; COURTESY OF MARK COLYVAN