Steven Johnson, who writes Discover’s Emerging Technology column (page 24) every month, also produced a popular three-feature series for the magazine last year on the brain and emotion. That led to a book, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain, Neuroscience, and the Search for the Self, published by Scribner in February. He even had his own brain scanned and analyzed, and the images appear in the book. “It’s a weird kind of nakedness,” he says.


Courtesy of Daniel J. McCoy

Grant Delin has photographed a variety of subjects for Discover, including alpaca mummies in Peru, alligator hatchlings in Florida, and now meteorites at the Field Museum in Chicago (“Meenakshi Wadhwa: In Her Own Words,” page 60). “I’ve been to the Barringer Meteor Crater near Flagstaff, so I know what kind of impact they have,” he says. His work has appeared in a wide range of publications, including Fortune, Vibe, and Newsweek.

Courtesy of Louis A. Kunzig IV  

The story of methane hydrates (“20,000 Microbes Under the Sea,” page 32) excites former Discover executive editor Robert Kunzig because “it shows that once again we haven’t tapped what’s left to discover.” Last fall the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts honored Kunzig for his contribution to oceanography through his book Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science.

Courtesy of Lori Kennedy

When Los Angeles–based photographer Sian Kennedy traveled to the Yukon Territory in Canada to chronicle the work of paleobiologists digging for fossils of megafauna (“Monsters on Ice,” page 52), he thought the area would be like the northwestern United States. But, he says, “the Yukon is bigger than big. It’s dramatically different from any other place I’ve seen in the United States. It escapes imagination. It’s off the map.” Kennedy has shot for numerous publications, including Outside, Esquire, GQ, Newsweek, Fast Company, Premiere, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine.