On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
Sitting by his laptop on the Mission Bay campus, Orion Weiner of the University of California, San Francisco, is watching a movie of an immune cell called a neutrophil scurrying across his computer screen. The movie, made with a conventional optical microscope, reveals that a fuzzy vanguard of proteins is driving the neutrophil. But when he opens a second movie file of the motion, this one made with a more advanced light microscopy technique called total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF), the vanguard no longer appears as one solid front of proteins but rather as a wave of individual proteins pushing forward like ripples from a pebble in a pond.
Weiner never expected to find this robust wave motion, and until recently, he would not have been able to visually capture it using a light microscope. And even now that the technology to do so exists, such advanced tools are typically limited to the very fortunate and few. At U.C.S.F., there is a plan to change that.
Subscribe to Support Independent Journalism
Great science journalism requires human expertise, time, effort and creativity. And it costs money. That’s why I and the journalists here at Scientific American hope you’ll join our community.
When you subscribe, you are supporting staff and freelance journalists who are passionate about telling science stories that are true, important and compelling. Our editors and reporters are often experts in their fields, which means they understand the nuances of big discoveries and can untangle the breakthroughs from the hype. With a subscription, you are also supporting rigorous fact-checking to ensure the words we publish are precise and accurate. And you’re supporting original illustrations, graphics and photos that bring you closer to an advanced laboratory, an ice sheet in Antarctica or a space mission in orbit. You’re helping us craft other types of high-quality journalism as well: Our newsletters are carefully written, edited and curated by staffers you have or will come to know and love. Our Science Quickly podcast is based on original reporting, collaboration with editors and scientists and exacting production.
Subscriptions keep this engine running so we can continue to deliver thoughtful, rigorous and independent science journalism to you. In an era of viral misinformation, this work is crucial. If you value what we do, I hope you’ll consider joining us as a subscriber
