Award Winners

In a comprehensive multimedia story, the Washington Post team told how Crawford Lake in Ontario has evidence, perhaps more than any other place on Earth, that humans have changed the planet’s chemistry and climate in such fundamental ways that many scientists believe they mark a new chapter in geologic time called the Anthropocene. Digging into the sediments of the lake, scientists uncovered a record of more than a thousand years of history. By 1950 or so, a rapid, dramatic increase of carbon-based particles shows up from industrial processes, including coal-fired steelmaking in a nearby…

Researchers are racing against the destruction of the Amazon to ensure the survival of the Mato Grosso titi monkey, one of the world's most endangered primates, Duda Menegassi told her readers. In the municipality of Alta Floresta, where the new species was discovered, the deforestation rate increased more than tenfold between 2012 and 2022. Menegassi accompanied a research team deep into the rainforest for on-the-ground reporting about a single pair of monkeys isolated in one patch of forest surrounded by farmland. Their location unfortunately overlaps with the most dangerous region of the…

In his investigation of a bogus doctor selling an herbal cure-all for malaria and other ills, Kemi Busari, Nigeria editor for an African fact-checkers organization called Dubawa, found that hundreds of thousands of bottles of the brew likely were sold monthly. Distressingly, the “doctor” was urging people to turn away from hospitals and modern medicine and trust in the power of his brew, particularly for children. Bottles of the concoction displayed two fake registration numbers from Nigeria’s regulatory body for food and drugs, Busari found. The agency did issue one genuine registration…

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) used to be a disease that almost exclusively affected poultry, but in 2004 it spread to wild birds in China. Like humans who unwittingly carried SARS-CoV-2 on airplanes from Wuhan to Europe, the United States and beyond in early 2020, infected wild birds are often asymptomatic, so they can migrate carrying the virus. With such broad distribution of HPAI last year, Paul Tullis writes, “there is now a very real concern that the spread of a virus that originated with human activity — mass poultry farming — is now coming around to bite humans back.” He…

Bahar Dutt followed biologist Ayushi Jain on a quest to save the Asian giant softshell turtle, once found across South and East Asia and today on the edge of extinction. Called Bhimanama locally, the giant turtle can be more than three feet long and weigh more than 220 pounds. When Jain started out, “We didn't know whether the turtle was still present in the country,” she said. She began partnering with those thought to be the turtle’s enemy, the fishers in whose nets the giants would get trapped as bycatch. Soon fishers started sharing information on sightings and nesting. Jain followed up by…

The winning "Wild Hope" series looked at a variety of habitat restoration and species recovery efforts, emphasizing the resilience of nature when given a chance and the value of hope in the face of unrelenting reports on the potentially devastating impacts of climate change. From efforts to introduce a billion oysters along New York City’s shoreline, to assessing the results of dam removals on the Elwha River in Washington state, to reporting on cooperative efforts to create a haven for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker on an Army artillery range at Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg) in…

Australian podcaster and host Wendy Zukerman and the "Science Vs" podcast team dug into the science of “superbugs,” bacteria that can’t be killed by some of the strongest antibiotics. We've been hearing about this problem for years, Zukerman notes, but recently it has become apparent that the bugs are not only scary, they also have been discovered in many locations, including hitching a ride on tiny pieces of plastic in the ocean. Bacteria started learning tricks to outsmart antibiotics long before humans started using them against infections, Zukerman notes, and they can readily share their…

Stephen Ornes recounts an early career choice of Chelsea Wood, who wanted to be a marine biologist but who wound up working during college in a research lab that specialized in parasitic worms. At first, she thought they were disgusting. “I thought they were gross and slimy,” she told Ornes. “Why would anyone ever want to work on them.” She saw, however, that while parasites could be harmful to an individual organism, they also could be beneficial to the ecosystems in which they live. She became hooked. “Parasites just wormed their way into my heart,” Wood says. Now an ecologist at the…

Throughout much of 2020, the World Health Organization maintained that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spreads through relatively large respiratory droplets that are expelled by infected people while coughing, sneezing or speaking. It took many months for the agency to acknowledge that the virus could travel on tiny particles called aerosols that can spread widely and linger in the air. What happens inside the aerosol particles and how does the virus get into the lungs and cells of a new victim? A research team led by biophysicist Rommie Amaro of the University of California San…

After years of controversy, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board in California assured the public that eating local crops irrigated with oil field wastewater “creates no identifiable increased health risks,” based on studies commissioned as part of an extensive Food Safety Project. Yet a review of the science and interviews with a public health scientist affiliated with the project and other experts, Liza Gross and contributor Anne Marshall-Chalmers reported, showed little evidence to support the board’s safety claims. GSI Environmental, a “neutral, third-party consultant”…

In a deeply reported 10,000-word story on the controversy over the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic, Beijing-based science writer Jane Qiu gained unparalleled access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the lab of Shi Zhengli. Known as China’s “bat woman,” Shi has devoted her career to tracing links between coronaviruses in bats and human disease. Shi’s lab was the first to isolate the deadly new virus and the first to sequence its genome. Shi has been subject to intense international scrutiny and charges that an errant virus from her lab rather than a…

Temperatures in Fairbanks, Alaska have risen so much that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially changed the city’s subarctic definition in 2021 to “warm summer continental.” As the climate warms, the ancient permafrost that covered an estimated 85 percent of Alaska is thawing, leaving places where the ground is now collapsing. As Lois Parshley writes in her award-winning piece, spruce trees “lean drunkenly” in places where “only a thin layer of soil covers yawning craters where the ice has vanished.” The disappearance of the ice has fundamentally changed how and where…

A subset of COVID-19 survivors suffers from an unexpected side effect known as parosmia, a condition that causes the sense of smell to go haywire. Coffee smells like sewage and chicken smells like rotting garbage. Yara Elmjouie and his colleagues set out to learn how COVID-19 is doing this to people, and what life is like when you smell and taste all the wrong things with no end in sight. “Through fascinating case studies, we learn not only how devastating COVID-19 symptoms have been for certain people, but also learn to appreciate the one sense we often take for granted—taste,” said judge…

Thousands of ancient footprints left by Ice Age humans and animals stretch for miles across the blinding white landscape of New Mexico’s White Sands National Park. The prints capture moments when humans crossed paths with now-extinct Ice Age beasts, including mammoths, enormous ground sloths, dire wolves, and camels. Tracks usually disappear soon after they are made, but in a place like White Sands, where the chemistry is just right, the tracks can last for thousands of years, hidden beneath the dunes. A team of experts is now investigating how these tracks could show new evidence of people…

In a savvy episode of its “What the Duck” radio show, ABC Science in Australia took on a topic not often broached in polite circles but one that has intrigued zoologists and others curious about animal behavior―Does it fart? From whales, manatees and herring to chimps, bonobos, Tasmanian devils and hognose snakes, the program provided answers to its central question and discussed the science behind using farts as a means of communication, defense, change in buoyancy for sea creatures, and even predatory advantage in the case of beaded lacewing larvae that expel a chemical mix that paralyzes…

In an ambitiously comprehensive look at the state of South Korea’s zoos, Kids Donga Science enlisted children as “Zoo Guards” to help report on regulated and unregulated zoos near their homes. Under the guidance of veterinarians and other professionals, the teams of children found more than 150 facilities that did not need to register as zoos because they housed fewer than 10 species or 50 individual animals. Most of them were animal experience centers such as raccoon cafes and parrot cafes, which have been surging in number and which have raised concerns about possible zoonotic disease…