Stories by Jeffery DelViscio

Jeffery DelViscio is currently chief multimedia editor/executive producer at Scientific American. He is former director of multimedia at STAT, where he oversaw all visual, audio and interactive journalism. Before that he spent more than eight years at the New York Times, where he worked on five different desks across the paper. He holds dual master's degrees in journalism and in Earth and environmental sciences from Columbia University. He has worked onboard oceanographic research vessels and tracked money and politics in science from Washington, D.C. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018. His work has won numerous awards, including two News and Documentary Emmy Awards.

Scientific American Logo
MedicineMarch 27, 2020

Inside the Race to Blast COVID-19 Off the Surfaces of New York City

As the Covid-19 pandemic overwhelms hospitals and shuts down American cities, it has also placed new demands on janitors and specialized cleaners. In New York City, it's Reuven Noyman's job to clean up after the coronavirus. He's fought it in apartments, hotel, hospitals, gyms, and office buildings. And unfortunately, his work is just beginning. 

Read more about Noyman here.

Jeffery DelViscio

Scientific American Logo
Public HealthFebruary 5, 2020

Will the New Coronavirus Keep Spreading or Not? You Have to Know One Little Number

Whenever there’s a new outbreak, scientists rush to calculate a number called R0, or R-naught. Why? It’s been a critical part of the scientific effort to understand just how transmissible the new virus is. Here’s how.

Editor’s Note (2/11/20): The video in this story has been revised after posting. It originally incorrectly referred to SARS as “sudden acute respiratory syndrome.” The full name is “severe acute respiratory syndrome.”

Jeffery DelViscio, Tanya Lewis, Amanda Montañez

Scientific American Logo
BiologyOctober 17, 2019

The Color of Noise: What Do Hues Have to Do with Sound?

You have probably already heard, or at least heard of, white noise. Maybe you grew up when televisions were still analog. If so, you might remember the shhh that accompanied “snow” on a cathode-ray tube screen. It lived in special place between the few channels on the dial that actually had programming. And in that snow, you could see—and hear—residual cosmic radiation born in the big bang.

Or maybe you grew up in the age of apps and downloaded one of the many designed for relaxation or helping people focus. Perhaps you have even purchased a white noise machine to lull your newborn—or yourself—to sleep.

But what is white noise, exactly? Why does it affect humans the way it seems to? And what, for that matter, is pink, violet, brown or blue noise? What does color even have to do with it at all? Watch this video, and you may find that the hues of noise are all around you—and that you never recognized what you were hearing.

Jeffery DelViscio

PreviousNext