American Scientist

In this issue’s Sightings column (“Giants in Traffic”), I spoke to a group of Chilean researchers about their study that tracks blue whales and ships. The team used multiple types of data to create detailed maps for their peer-reviewed paper, but for social media, they created a GIF of a week in the life of one whale, showing how it had to constantly duck and dodge around boats. The GIF raised questions from other scientists about the scale, the speed of the display, whether it was real data or an animation, and whether the whale’s position was at the surface or at depths below the boats—points that were all addressed in the researchers’ paper. But for most of the people who viewed the GIF, which was widely shared, the whale’s plight simply evoked sympathy and awareness. As a member of the research team, Luis Bedriñana-Romano, said to me, “You can put up a lovely chart with graphics and it’s going to only reach the scientific community. But if you have a nice data visualization, it can reach everyone.”

Data scientist Kurt D. Bollacker, who wrote in our pages in 2010, has become his own internet meme for having said, “Data that is loved tends to survive.” Bollacker’s quote sticks with people, because it clearly expresses the idea that data only become useful if they are seen and understood. The theme of how to express data so it is immediately accessible runs across many articles in this issue.

Tracking whales with satellites and tags comes up again in “The Shift to a Bird’s-Eye View,” by Elizabeth M. P. Madin and Catherine M. Foley. These researchers discuss the many ways that remote sensing technologies have changed the data that are available to scientists, from studies of coral reefs and penguin colonies, to refugee displacement and pollutant monitoring.

Making health data approachable is also the goal of Kim Moss in this issue’s Arts Lab, “Etching the Landscapes Within.” Moss uses a different path to data visualization by etching microscopic body processes onto glass plates and illuminating them with colored lights, a beautiful and memorable way to consider tissue damage and repair processes. And in this issue’s Q&A, economist Micah Pollak describes his efforts to take complicated data sets related to the pandemic and create visualizations that he can share on social media, both to make the data understandable and to spark discussion and iterative revision of graphics to address public questions.

Understanding processes on scales too small to be seen is a central idea in Perspective (“Tunnel Vision,”) in which Dean J. Tantillo uses the metaphor of tunneling through hills to make a quantum mechanical phenomenon more relatable. And on a metabolic level, in “How Endocrine Disruptors Affect Menstruation” Kate Clancy displays how chemicals such as phthalates can alter the function of endometrial cells. In Spotlight (“Fixing Broken Biological Clocks,”), Katie L. Burke details how biological clock cycles are tied into a particular cell receptor pathway.

In our July–August issue, the data visualization that went into space as a message to potential aliens on a plaques carried by the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft was a point in “Who Should Speak for the Earth?,” by John W. Traphagan. In the print version of the article, the caption about Pioneer 10 contained an error that was introduced in editing, which is corrected in this issue’s errata section as well as online. In the interest of correct data transmission to our readers, we apologize for the error.

Data can take us from the smallest to the largest phenomena, and we return to space in this issue’s Infographic (“The Wild Heart of the Milky Way”). A breathtaking new image of our galaxy’s center has been impressing scientists, and our senior consulting editor Corey S. Powell breaks down just what the new image shows. We hope you’ll join us on this issue’s tour of remarkable data at all scales.—Fenella Saunders (@Fenella Saunders)