Volume 98, Issue 1, of the Yale Scientific Magazine arrives at a time of escalating attacks on science both in academia and in public life across the United States. At the time of printing, thousands of scientists have been forced out or fired from jobs at federal agencies, and billions of dollars in federal science funding have been cut or frozen. The funding cuts, as well as proposed restrictions on how universities can spend on overhead costs, threaten the ability of institutions like Yale to provide the foundations necessary for all varieties of scientific work. Meanwhile, attacks on diversity and freedom of expression at universities imperil the intellectual landscape of higher education. To speak to this perilous time in science, we are continuing the Yale Scientific Magazine’s longstanding tradition centering the scientific process as the zenith of human curiosity. It is curiosity, after all, that grants us sharp vision and the will to reach out to the world around us, even in the face of obstacles.
In this issue, Yale physicists probe the nature of superconductivity, a Yale psychologist questions the origins of cognitive biases, and multiple teams develop new methods to glimpse inside the biochemical processes that animate the world’s living systems. We profile the scholar of religions and medical anthropology Angelin T. Mathew (p. 34), and we learn about new frontiers in a profile of the space startup expert John-Paul Menez (p. 35). In the cover story, entitled “The Grand DESIgn,” two Yale researchers construct imaging devices that help cosmologists build an unprecedented map of the universe (p. 16). Stories of this nature are not new to the pages of the Yale Scientific Magazine. As ever, the broad coverage of diverse fields and the breaking-down of technical explanations serves to make every field of science vivid and accessible. The writers, artists, and designers behind the articles do the crucial work of translating the scientific topics from the fresh pages of the world’s premier academic journals to the timely magazine that our team hopes you will engage with today.
Moving into this new volume of the Yale Scientific Magazine, I am grateful for the new and returning members of the Masthead. As a result of conversations among members of the Editorial Board, we are inaugurating a special series for this volume entitled “Science on Trial” (p. 39). The new series, managed by the Special Sections Editor, focuses on the complex interactions between the scientific process and the urgent realities of the law and politics in the United States. We are also continuing to bolster efforts within the magazine to highlight the contributions of historically underrepresented groups in science and to expand the magazine’s multimedia presence online. We look forward to a year of bold curiosity and bright science with Yale Scientific Magazine.