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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 "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…

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…

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…

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…

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…