Award Winners

Scientists are finding direct, sometimes surprising, connections between climate changes in the Arctic and Antarctic and disruptive events closer to home. The NPR team used text and supporting multimedia resources to vividly explain how phenomena occurring thousands of miles away are producing sea level rise along the coast of Texas, increasingly destructive wildfires in the western United States, and changes in the feeding behavior of right whales in the North Atlantic. Melting ice in West Antarctica disproportionately affects Texas, in part because major ocean currents carry the meltwater to…

In three stories for WyoFile, a local Wyoming news outlet, Christine Peterson tackled wildlife stories with attention to questions not often explored. In a piece on chipmunks captured for research, she delved into the question of whether surviving animals should eventually be released back into the wild rather than euthanized. Two University of Wyoming researchers argued that even the chipmunks born at their facility had abilities to survive because they were fed wild foods, kept in outdoor pens where they were exposed to predators, and were seldom handled by humans. The Wyoming Game and Fish…

The racist manifesto of a mass shooter at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y. does more than reflect one person’s distorted views, Ashley Smart told his readers. It is emblematic of a broader spread of scientific racism that appropriates legitimate genetics research for extremist ends. The manifesto manipulates, misinterprets, and distorts the findings of mainstream genetics studies in addition to citing widely discredited studies on the fringes of academic research. The more reputable studies do not directly take up the question of racial difference, Smart noted, “but they explore themes that…

With vibrant, often lyrical writing, Lauren Fuge took her readers to the Grove of Giants in southern Tasmania, where she strapped on a harness and scaled an 80-meter (262 feet) blue gum tree to join researchers studying island canopies aloft that teem with life. It wasn’t until the 1990s, she notes, that botanists first climbed into the worlds at the tops of giant trees. “Yet, our bodies still hold memories of our ancestors’ arboreal lives,” Fuge wrote. “My hands grip the rope with opposable thumbs that stuck in our evolutionary line because they’re useful for grasping branches. ... We were…

Parasites are not particularly loveable. They survive by living off other organisms and have been described as evolutionary cheaters. Some well-known parasites are fleas, ticks, leeches, tapeworms, and mosquitoes. They can infect humans and transmit disease. But Emily Driscoll and Jeffery DelViscio reported that scientists are becoming increasingly aware of the vital role wildlife parasites can play in keeping ecosystems balanced. Many of these hangers-on have been with their hosts for much longer than humans have existed. Lemurs and their parasites, for instance, are thought to have evolved…

In a film that explores the heritage and future of African astronomy, from prehistoric ruins to Islamic skywatchers, it is NASA’s current Lucy spacecraft that drives the narrative and the dreams of visionary Senegalese astronomer Maram Kaire. The spacecraft is on a mission to fly by a series of asteroids to help scientists better understand the birth of our solar system. Although Lucy’s flightpath has been calculated precisely, the flight team relies on events called “stellar occultations” to fine tune the spacecraft’s close encounters. Kaire’s team in West Africa is shown preparing to record…

The winning BBC series traced the development of the eugenics movement and its repercussions in the modern age. Presenter Adam Rutherford told the story of eugenics from its origins in the middle-class salons of Victorian Britain, through the Fitter Family competitions and sterilization laws of the Gilded Age in the United States, to the genocidal horrors of Nazi Germany. The movement to breed better humans, driven in Britain by scientist Francis Galton, gained adherents in the United States and elsewhere. Attendees at the First International Eugenics Congress of 1912 in London included…

Laura Allen told her young readers about scientists who are learning how to make cement and brick construction materials more Earth-friendly with a surprising ingredient: poop. In some cases, the feces come from grazing animals such as cows, whose manure is full of plant fibers. Recycling sludge — the material from sewage-treatment plants — also works. Both types of poop have chemical ingredients useful in making cement and bricks. Large amounts of sewage sludge get buried in landfills each year, Allen reports, but making construction materials with it instead could put this waste to better…

In an evocative piece from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, reporter Juliet Eilperin and photographer Salwan Georges use a single majestic Sitka spruce tree, the height of a 17-story building, to spotlight the battle over the fate of increasingly scarce old-growth timber. The tree is estimated to contain at least 6,000 board feet of lumber worth $17,500. Just as impressively, it has locked up nearly 12 metric tons of carbon dioxide in its fibers, a repository for the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that threaten humanity. “Covered in a riotous mix of pale lichens and deep-green moss,” Eilperin…

In rural India, a rare genetic disease called spinocerebellar ataxia has been causing people to gradually lose control over their body movements. As Ankur Paliwal writes, “Eventually many ataxia patients in resource-strapped countries like India end up spending their days in bed, dependent on others, until they die.” Patients with the disorder “remain invisible to the health system,” he writes, “because they don’t have popular champions. Institutional support for ataxia is almost negligible.” Paliwal describes the work of a few determined scientists and doctors who have been trying to unravel…

For years, residents in the Glades area of west central Florida have breathed smoke from sugar cane fires, set six months of every year as a pre-harvest practice. Locals call the ash that rains down on the community during burning season “black snow.” While sugar companies and regulators offer assurances that the air is safe, The Palm Beach Post and ProPublica used their own monitoring equipment to show repeated spikes in pollution on days when the state had authorized cane burning. Experts were concerned, saying the short-term spikes, which often reached four times the average pollution…

Unlike rising seas, where the dangers are obvious, groundwater rise has remained under the public’s radar during the growing concern about climate change, Kendra Pierre-Louis reported. Hydrologists are aware of the problem, and it is the subject of ample scholarly research, she wrote, “but it has yet to surface in a significant way outside of those bubbles.” Groundwater rise is only briefly mentioned in the most recent edition of the National Climate Assessment, released in 2018, she reported, and it is absent from many state and regional climate adaptation plans, and even from flood maps. A…

The long-running Deep Look series, created by KQED San Francisco and distributed by PBS Digital Studios, takes viewers into the world of the very small, where organisms like honeypot ants, acorn barnacles and giant water bugs thrive and reproduce. The filmmakers explore unusual creatures doing unusual things at the edge of the visible world, like the honeypot ants who turn their biggest sisters into engorged jugs of nectar to help feed the ant colony. Or the male water bugs whose fatherhood chores include carrying fertilized eggs on their backs, bringing them to the water’s surface regularly…

For more than 30 years, Martin Dohrn filmed wild animals around the world. Suddenly locked down at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he became fascinated with the wild bees that inhabit his city garden. “Turning my cameras onto my own back yard is revealing things as spectacular as anything I have ever seen before,” he tells his viewers. “Transporting me to another universe. Another dimension of existence.” The resulting documentary is an exercise in citizen science, driven by Dohrn’s deep appreciation and understanding of the more than 60 species of bees he found and observed in his garden…

In a podcast series on the highly visible and often controversial efforts to teach gorillas and chimpanzees to learn sign language, Arielle Duhaime-Ross and colleagues reviewed the history of Project Koko, started in the 1970s by a young psychologist named Penny Patterson who claimed to have taught a gorilla named Koko to learn more than 1,000 signs. Koko became world-famous, with her picture on the cover of National Geographic, but designing language isn’t straightforward and critics suggested that Koko was simply being prompted by her trainers' unconscious cues to display specific signs…

The judges liked the cartoon format in these stories from Science News Explores (formerly known as Science News for Students ), published by Science News Media Group. The stories discussed how cockatoos teach each other how to open garbage bins, how pandas stand out in zoos but blend into their environment in the wild, and how researchers managed to put goldfish in the driver’s seat in an experimental apparatus that allows them to maneuver across a room. “I loved all three stories and the wonderful way the well-written text jibed with the comics,” said judge Christine Dell’Amore, online…