Allison Parshall | Multimedia Science Journalist

  • Illustration of people dancing around a maypole, in the colors of the asexual flag. Credit: Marcos Chin

    Asexuality Is Finally Breaking Free from Medical Stigma | Scientific American

    New research on asexuality shows why it’s so important for doctors and therapists to distinguish between episodes of low libido and a consistent lack of sexual attraction (January 2024 feature)

  • Digital illustration of a hiker walking slowly down a curve, and a runner running down steeper steps. Credit: Allison Li/Quanta Magazine

    Risky Giant Steps Can Solve Optimization Problems Faster | Quanta Magazine

    New results break with decades of conventional wisdom for the gradient descent algorithm.

  • Illustration of a translucent blue ball spinning on a stick. Inside the blue ball are two smaller balls connected by a spring, all set against a dark background containing more small balls and spring-like particles. | Credit: Brookhaven National Lab

    ‘Unbelievable’ Spinning Particles Probe Nature’s Most Mysterious Force | Scientific American

    The strong force holds our atoms together. Scientists may have observed its small-scale fluctuations for the first time

  • An underground heat map of the Chicago loop district. The areas underneath buildings are hotter than those beneath nearby Grant Park. Credit:  Credit: Alessandro F. Rotta Loria (temperature data); OpenStreetMap (base map) (CC BY-SA 2.0)

    Underground Climate Change Is Weakening Buildings in Slow Motion | Scientific American

    Hotspots beneath cities deform the ground, causing important infrastructure to crack under stress (Appeared in October 2023 issue)

  • Illustration of data points connected by line segments into colorful triangles. Credit: Kristina Armitage

    After a Quantum Clobbering, One Approach Survives Unscathed | Quanta Magazine

    A quantum approach to data analysis that relies on the study of shapes will likely remain an example of a quantum advantage — albeit for increasingly unlikely scenarios.

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    What Are Puberty Blockers, and How Do They Work? | Scientific American

    Decades of data support the use and safety of puberty-pausing medications, which give transgender adolescents and their families time to weigh important medical decisions

  • An animation of words spiraling out from a human brain. Credit: Jerry Tang/Alexander Huth

    A Brain Scanner Combined with an AI Language Model Can Provide a Glimpse into Your Thoughts | Scientific American

    New technology gleans the gist of stories a person hears while laying in a brain scanner

  • Illustration of Earth from space with three particles surrounding it. These three particles are connected by wisps of 1s and 0s. Credit: Kristina Armitage

    New Entanglement Results Hint at Better Quantum Codes | Quanta Magazine

    A team of physicists has entangled three photons over a considerable distance, which could lead to more powerful quantum cryptography.

  • A woman sits on a window ledge, in an office, looking into the camera. Credit:  Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine

    The Cryptographer Who Ensures We Can Trust Our Computers | Quanta Magazine

    Yael Tauman Kalai’s breakthroughs secure the digital world, from cloud computing to our quantum future.

  • Microscopic image of lung cells infected with P. aeruginosa bacteria.  Benoit-Joseph Laventie, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

    Deadly Bacteria in Eyedrops May Spread from Person to Person | Scientific American

    Infections of a new strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa that have led to blindness and death highlight the worsening antibiotic resistance crisis

  • A mosaic made of t-shirt shaped, 13-sided tiles

    Discovery of Elusive ‘Einstein’ Tile Raises More Questions Than It Answers | Scientific American

    A surprisingly simple answer to a mathematical puzzle intrigues the math world (Appeared in June 2023 issue)

  • An array of four pairs of images. The four images on top are of a teddy bear, a mausoleum, a skiier, and a clock tower. Below is is a dream-like re-renderings of that same image. You can still tell what each image is, though it's less clear.

    AI Can Re-create What You See from a Brain Scan | Scientific American

    Image-generating AI is getting better at re-creating what people are looking at from their fMRI data. But this isn’t mind reading—yet

  • Chloroplasts in plant cells. Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, CC BY-SA 4.0

    Plant Cell Parts Turn into Glass to Soak Up Sun | Scientific American

    Chloroplasts’ choreography keeps plant cells powered (Appeared in May 2023 issue)

  • A gif of the night sky illuminated by auroras. A band closest to the ground glows bright neon green, and above it, the sky is magenta. Credit: Igor Babets @arkadiev

    Northern Lights Dance across U.S. because of ‘Stealthy’ Sun Eruptions | Scientific American

    A severe geomagnetic storm created auroras that were visible as far south as Arizona in the U.S.

  • Vintage-style, black and white photo of two women. The older woman crouches behind the younger woman. | Credit: Boris Eldagsen, Co-Created with DALL-E 2

    How My AI Image Won a Major Photography Competition (Q&A) | Scientific American

    Boris Eldagsen submitted an AI-generated image to a photography contest as a “cheeky monkey” and sparked a debate about AI’s place in the art world

  • Illustration of a person smelling a rose. Inside their brain is an abstract representation of possible smells, like hibiscus, lily, and rose. The rose section is lit up in red.  [Credit: Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine]

    Machine Learning Highlights a Hidden Order in Scents | Quanta Magazine

    Efforts to build a better digital “nose” suggest that our perception of scents reflects both the structure of aromatic molecules and the metabolic processes that make them.

  • A new “laser lightning rod” in action. Atop a mountain in the clouds, a green laser beam shoots over top a pointed observation tower. Credit: TRUMPF/Martin Stollberg

    Scientists Fire Lasers at the Sky to Control Lightning | Scientific American

    Laser beams could be used to deflect lightning strikes from vulnerable places such as airports and wind farms. (Appeared in April 2023 print issue)

  • A newborn infant swaddled in a clear bassinet. An adult stands with a hand on the baby's back. Photo by Solen Feyissa, Unsplash

    A Common Antibiotic Could Prevent Deaths from Childbirth Complications | Scientific American

    One in three cases of maternal sepsis can be prevented with a single dose of antibiotic, a study in low- and middle-income countries shows

  • A bright star shines in the center of a purple ring of gaseous clouds, against a black starry background. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

    Rare, Dust-Shrouded Dying Star Revealed in New JWST Image | Scientific American

    Before exploding as supernovae, massive Wolf-Rayet stars spew gas and dust into space, seeding the formation of future stellar and planetary systems

  • Artistic rendering of two merging black holes inside a merging galaxy. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO); M. Weiss (NRAO/AUI/NSF) (CC BY 3.0)

    Colliding Supermassive Black Holes Discovered in Nearby Galaxy | Scientific American

    These merging supermassive black holes are among the closest ever observed and could help unlock deeper secrets of cosmic history

  • A woman, Cynthia Rudin, stands smiling outside against a forested backdrop. Credit: Alex M. Sanchez, Quanta Magazine

    The Computer Scientist Peering Inside AI’s Black Boxes | Quanta Magazine

    Cynthia Rudin wants machine learning models, responsible for increasingly important decisions, to show their work.

  • Looking up at gey, modern-looking, tall buildings from street-level. Credit: Expect Best | Pexels

    New Color-Changing Coating Could Both Heat and Cool Buildings | Scientific American

    A thin film can switch from releasing heat to trapping it, and wrapping the coating around buildings could make them more energy-efficient

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    Living with Lead Creates Antibiotic-Resistant 'Superbugs' | Scientific American

    People are infected by bacteria that, after contacting heavy metals, develop drug-resistant traits

  • Illustration of meteorites connected to one another as if in the amino acid chemical structure. Credit: Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine

    Inside Ancient Asteroids, Gamma Rays Made Building Blocks of Life | Quanta Magazine

    A new radiation-based mechanism adds to the ways that amino acids could have been made in space and brought to the young Earth.

  • Aerial view of wastewater treatment facility

    Wastewater can track viruses like Covid-19 — Can it do the same for superbugs? | Inverse

    A pandemic program could help reveal the true threat of antibiotic resistance to public health.

  • A girl in VR goggles immersed in a digital world, digital illustration [Credit: Kurniaindah, Vecteezy.com | Free license]

    Why an assault on your VR body can feel so real | Scienceline

    Our brains are easily fooled into taking ownership of a virtual body, decades of psychology research shows

  • The dark hull of a ship stands out against the greenish-glow of the sea at night.

    Mysterious "milky seas" captured on camera for the first time | Inverse

    You’ve never seen anything like it.

  • A black and white image of a long, white bacterium under a microscope

    Scientists discovered the biggest bacteria ever, and it's the size of an eyelash | Inverse

    This massive bacteria is breaking all the rules

  • Artistic reconstruction of a yunnanozoan, a fish-like creature from 518 million years ago. Its gills are supported by arches that look like little spines.

    518 million-year-old fossil worm reveals direct connection to human evolution | Inverse

    The ancestor we deserve.

  • Colorful image of the Milky Way galaxy center. Credit: European Southern Observatory

    Essential molecules for life discovered near center of Milky Way — again | Inverse

    Scientists have found more of the ingredients for life as we know it in a gaseous cloud toward the center of the Milky Way