Courtesy of Jessica Kowal

While researching a story about the annual whale migration off the West Coast,, Blaine Harden, a national correspondent for The Washington Post, heard about transient killer whales terrorizing harbor seals near Puget Sound. He decided it was the better story (“Wild Ones,” page 52). “They seemed to psychologically traumatize those [seals] they didn’t eat,” he says. Harden covers the American West for the Post and is the author of two books, Africa: Dispatches From a Fragile Continent and A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia.


Courtesy of Anne Kahill

Even with 20 years of science-feature photography under his belt, it took several hours for Joe McNally to figure out how to photograph a steel ball bearing bouncing on a super-high-tech metal for “Glassy Metals” (page 46). “I wanted the image to show the superior energy of this material,” he says. In the end, it was low tech to the rescue: “Our solution involved a small flashlight.” Joe has photographed for National Geographic, Life, and Time.

In the 1990s Le Anne Schreiber, a former sports and book review editor at The New York Times, wrote Midstream and Light Years, memoirs of her family’s struggles with terminal cancer. Keith Black’s brain cancer research (page 66) interested her because it has the potential to reduce the painful side effects of chemotherapy for all cancer patients. “The brain cannot tolerate side effects, so all of Black’s efforts are aimed toward developing cancer treatments that have no collateral damage,” she says.

Courtesy of David Hartung

Chien-Chi Chang lives in Taipei and New York, but Discover sent him to Beijing to photograph the world’s largest palace compound (“Treasures of the Forbidden City,” page 42). He was impressed by the relationship between archivists at Chicago’s Field Museum and Chinese archaeologists. They were “professional and sincere—there is a sense of warmth and mutual trust,” he says. Chang has photographed for National Geographic and The New York Times Magazine, among others.