Stories on the discovery of vital fluid-transport systems in the human body are among the winners of the 2024 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards. Winning journalists also did immersive stories on scientists and physicians at work – in the field, in the lab and in the emergency room.
Independent panels of science journalists select the winners of the awards, which are administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and endowed by The Kavli Foundation. There is a Gold Award ($5,000) and Silver Award ($3,500) for each of the eight categories. The global awards program drew entries from 59 countries this year, 57 percent of them from international entrants.
A team at WNYC’s Radiolab in New York City won the Silver Award in the Audio category for describing in noteworthy detail how researchers discovered a network of fluid-filled spaces that spans the body, connecting tissues and organs. A better understanding of the network, called the interstitium, could improve diagnosis and treatment of cancer cells that spread throughout the body.
Emily Sohn, a freelance journalist, won the Silver Award in the Small Outlet category for her story in The Transmitter – an outlet that covers neuroscience – about controversial research by Danish neuroscientist Meiken Nedergaard on a fluid system within the brain that helps clear metabolic waste products, including proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Freelancer Simar Bajaj won the Gold Award in the Science Reporting – Large Outlet category for a gripping profile for The Guardian US of Joseph Sakran, a Baltimore trauma surgeon who was shot in the throat as a teenager and who has become a national advocate against gun violence, which he regards as a public health emergency. Gemma Venhuizen of NRC, a national newspaper in the Netherlands, won the Silver Award in the Science Reporting – In-Depth category for her painstaking and sometimes unsettling story about her search for answers when she experienced a dangerous dilation of her aorta and was facing open heart surgery.
A NOVA/GBH documentary on “The Battle to Beat Malaria” won the Video In-Depth Gold Award for closely following the lengthy effort by Oxford University scientists to better understand the deadly malaria parasite and develop an effective vaccine against the disease. Wingspan Productions in the United Kingdom and HHMI Tangled Bank Studios in the United States collaborated on the winning program.
Kate Evans of New Zealand Geographic won the Gold Award in the Magazine category for her evocative piece on the red-billed gull, once omnipresent and widely considered merely a pest but now a disappearing and threatened species. Freelancer Alec Luhn, Silver Award winner in the same category for a piece in Scientific American, traveled to the largest stretch of wilderness in Alaska with scientists trying to understand why the Salmon River was turning orange and, as Luhn put it, “quite literally rusting.”
Of the 16 awards, seven went to international entrants and two to international/domestic collaborations. There were winning entrants from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria (for the second year in a row), and the United Kingdom. The winners will receive their award plaques in a ceremony at the 2025 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston in February.
“The winners illuminated the many directions from which science can answer important questions about the world in which we live,” said Sudip Parikh, CEO of AAAS and Executive Publisher of the Science family of journals. “The scientific process can sometimes be contentious, but it is durable and self-correcting.” He also noted the growing international reach of the awards program. “Science is a global enterprise, and it is gratifying that 57 percent of the entries came from international entrants,” Parikh said.
Here is the list of the winners of the 2024 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards:
Science Reporting – Large Outlet
Gold Award
Simar Bajaj
“He was shot in the throat. Now he saves gun victims as a trauma surgeon in Baltimore”
The Guardian US
June 20, 2024
“Historically one of the most conservative professions, medicine has long prided itself on being dispassionate, evidence-based and unmoored by external factors,” wrote Simar Bajaj in his profile of Johns Hopkins trauma surgeon Joseph Sakran. “In the name of professionalism, doctors are taught to keep their heads down, leave their political beliefs at the door and focus single-mindedly on what they’ve trained to do: patient care.” But Sakran represents an emerging model, Bajaj wrote, calling him “a physician whose scope of practice swells beyond the hospital walls. He spent a year crafting health policy in the Senate, founded the coalitions Doctors for Biden and Doctors for Hillary, and has become one of the leading gun reform activists in the country, organizing tens of thousands of healthcare workers.” At age 17, Sakran was hit in the throat by a bullet fired randomly by a gang member. He spent six months recovering from the injury and was determined to show the medical team that saved his life that it was not a waste. By advocating for gun violence prevention, Sakran recognizes that treating the individual patient is not enough, writes Bajaj. Gun violence is a threat to public health, and doctors should treat populations as well. Judge Arielle Duhaime-Ross, a freelance science journalist and podcast host, said Bajaj’s piece “does an excellent job of diving into the history behind apolitical approaches to medicine, as well as the impact that a doctor can have when they decide to speak up about the issues affecting their patients’ health — in this case, guns — regardless of how that speech might be perceived politically.” Bajaj said he started freelancing two years ago “after being rejected from every internship I had applied to. Receiving this recognition is an unbelievable honor and a testament to my incredible editors and mentors.”
Silver Award
Jaela Bernstien and Emily Chung
“Discover where ancient rivers flow under Canadian cities”
CBC News (Canada)
April 3, 2024
Hidden in a labyrinth of tunnels and sewer pipes, buried rivers flow under Canadian cities, Jaela Bernstien and Emily Chung found. In a richly illustrated report, they ask whether the hidden waterways will be revived or fade from memory. Climate change and urbanization are heating and flooding cities, they note, and restoring buried waterways could have multiple benefits: cooling heat islands, absorbing carbon dioxide, cleaning the air, reducing flooding, and providing habitat for wildlife and native plants. Three of Canada’s major cities – Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver – are built not just along water bodies but over them. Mud Creek flows beneath Toronto, occasionally surfacing to trickle through narrow ravines. It is one candidate for “daylighting,” the practice of uncovering sections of buried streams where feasible. A branch of Still Creek in an industrial part of East Vancouver has been restored. Other cities are uncovering and restoring lost waterways as well, including Dartmouth, Nova Scotia; Yonkers, New York; Aarhus, Denmark; and Auckland, New Zealand. Judge Duda Menegassi, a freelance environmental journalist in Brazil, called the CBC story “fresh, visually stunning and delightful to read.” Bernstien and Chung’s reporting, she said, “gives visibility to ancient and often out-of-sight rivers, showing at the same time how much society loses when it covers up and loses track of those water courses.” Co-authors Jaela Bernstien and Emily Chung commented: “This award is for the citizen scientists, academics and city engineers who led us on an adventure peering through sewers, ducking into culverts and hopping fences to explore buried urban rivers. You are the heart of our story, and it’s because of your dedication that long-lost rivers across Canada — and the world — are being revived.”
Science Reporting – Small Outlet
Gold Award
Abdulwaheed Sofiullahi
“Niger Delta Communities Grappling With Health Impacts Of Gas Flaring”
HumAngle Media (Nigeria)
April 18, 2024
Abdulwaheed Sofiullahi described a widespread yet often overlooked issue in Nigeria’s Delta region. With around 2 million people living within four kilometers of gas flare sites, many are exposed to the black fumes and toxins emitted. Residents frequently report respiratory problems, skin rashes, and eye irritations, affecting over 67 per cent of the population, he reported. Gas flaring is the wasteful burning of natural gas from industrial oil extraction and production. The flaring releases a variety of environmental pollutants and greenhouse gases. Nigeria joins Russia, Iraq, Iran, and the United States among the world’s top nine countries responsible for most flaring, Sofiullahi notes. Despite the recent introduction of laws and regulations to address environmental and social issues stemming from excessive flaring, he says, communities in the Niger Delta region’s Rivers state continue to suffer from its effects. Sofiullahi arranged for an air quality specialist to conduct a field study that measured concentrations of key pollutants such as carbon monoxide and sulfur near a major gas flaring facility. The study also measured concentrations of particulate matter that can get deep into the lungs, causing serious breathing problems. The analysis revealed elevated concentrations of air pollutants exceeding the limits set by the World Health Organization and the Federal Environmental Protection Agency of Nigeria. “Sofiullahi makes a great journalistic effort to pursue an issue of social relevance for Nigeria, shedding light on the dangerous relation between the gas flaring facilities, air quality and the health of communities living close by,” said judge Duda Menegassi, a Brazilian freelance journalist. Sofiullahi said winning the award “means a lot to me because I never expected my work to get noticed internationally. My main goal has always been to do quality journalism that highlights issues affecting people in Nigeria’s oil-rich region.” Sofiullahi is the second journalist from Nigeria to win the AAAS Kavli award.
Silver Award
Emily Sohn
“Maiken Nedergaard’s power of disruption”
The Transmitter
February 26, 2024
Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish neuroscientist, is known for her research on “glymphatics” — a term she helped coin — to describe a network of channels that carry cerebrospinal fluid to and from the brain to wash away waste products. The research gathered a lot of attention and was one of Science magazine’s “Breakthroughs of the Year” in 2013. “There are experts who have dedicated their careers to working out the details of glymphatics and those who think the word shouldn’t exist,” Sohn writes. “Though arguing over results is standard practice in science, this conversation has intensified in a way that has surprised even those involved.” The stakes are high. “Understanding how, when and why cerebrospinal fluid moves through the brain could lead to new ways of preventing and treating neurological conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease,” Sohn notes. Nedergaard’s recent work on a newly proposed layer surrounding the brain called the SLYM has brought further attention and debate regarding her research. “As debates about the science continue, so do disagreements about how science works best,” Sohn writes. Among Nedergaard’s critics is Christer Betsholtz, a vascular biologist at Sweden’s Uppsala University and the Karolinska Institute. He not only disagrees with the work on SLYM, but also says the formal process of academic publishing takes too long to self-correct. But big ideas can draw interest to overlooked topics, argues Per Kristian Eide of Oslo University. “In science, you need some kind of disruptive changes to actually impact a field,” he told Sohn. Judge Dan Vergano, senior opinion editor at Scientific American, called Sohn’s piece “a carefully crafted deconstruction of a scientific conflict over the workings of the human brain. The story reveals how science really advances, in sometimes sharp disagreements that play out in experiments and debate over decades.” Sohn said her story “started out as a profile about a visionary neuroscientist and turned into an exploration of how science works best: incrementally or with big, bold ideas.” She thanked The Transmitter and editor Brady Huggett for giving her the space to explore a controversy in brain science “that has big implications but is still very much unsettled.”
Science Reporting – In-Depth
Gold Award
Serena Renner
Hakai Magazine (Canada)
July 18, 2023
In a piece tracing the history and impact of great storms called “atmospheric rivers,” Serena Renner told her readers how one of the storms in November 2021 dumped nearly a month’s worth of rain in two days on the British Columbia community of Abbotsford. Floods and landslides killed at least six in the larger region. Sumas Lake, once a 16,000-acre body of water that had been drained for farms and urban development despite supporting indigenous peoples for millennia, returned — if temporarily — to its historic territory. “Paradoxically, recent storms, including the one in British Columbia, have occurred between some of the hottest and driest summers on record,” Renner writes. “When they deliver needed rain, it’s too much for parched soils and concrete channels to contain.” The swing between deluge and drought — what meteorologists call “weather whiplash” — is expected to only grow more pronounced as the planet warms. In California, Renner notes, “Whether through foresight or surrender, communities there are giving up new ground for water and restoring some natural systems, to work with rain when it comes.” In Abbotsford, according to scientists and First Nation leaders, reviving Sumas Lake could help make the region more resilient to water extremes, but restoration of the lake will require buy-in from the wider community. Judge Ashley Smart, associate director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, said Renner’s story “was written in gorgeous prose, with lively pacing, smart structure, vivid scenes, and intriguing characters. And it beautifully connected the science of atmospheric rivers with the human stories of the people who are grappling with how to handle those weather phenomena.” Serena Renner thanked her Hakai Magazine editor, Sarah Gilman, for helping to structure the story and push it “to its full potential.” She also thanked her sources, “especially Kwilosintun Murray Ned from Semá:th (Sumas) First Nation, whose connections to Sumas Lake demonstrate how flooding isn’t always just an act of devastation; it can also be an act of restoration.”
Silver Award
Gemma Venhuizen
“How could such a thin sleeve mean the difference between life and death?”
NRC newspaper (Netherlands)
July 13, 2024
Dutch science journalist Gemma Venhuizen knew her aorta was slightly enlarged, and she had been undergoing annual heart scans to make sure the aortic bulge did not exceed norms for her age and body size. All that changed in 2023. She visited her cardiologist after her most recent scan and “waited for the reassuring words, but they didn’t come.” The scans had shown an increase in aortic dilation that presented a palpable risk. Her aorta, she wrote, “had in an instant become a ticking time bomb.” Before she had time to digest the information, her doctor was talking about conventional surgical options, Venhuizen said, but the doctor also mentioned a new, less invasive alternative — an unconventional approach developed by a British engineer who devised a way to wrap the aorta with a sort of compression sock, like taping a bulging garden hose. Venhuizen took readers through her search for answers, both as a science journalist and as a concerned patient. She eventually decided to go ahead with the wrapping of her aorta and later interviewed Tal Golesworthy, the British engineer who — faced with a dangerous aortic dilation himself — worked with medical specialists to develop the procedure. Asked about the praise he had received from patients, he shrugged. “I’m no hero,” he said. “I didn’t start this process to save people, I did it to save myself.” Judge Laura Helmuth, Editor in Chief of Scientific American, described Venhuizen’s writing as “open, funny, welcoming, and humane. She expressed a patient’s fears while also evaluating the research and technology with dispassion and expertise. It’s tricky to pull off a first-person story, and we can all learn from how she balanced her roles and added just enough personality to make the story even more engaging and powerful.” Venhuizen, who became patient number 935 worldwide to undergo the wrapping procedure, said: “I am very grateful that I could write this personal research story during my recovery and that it has been honored with the 2024 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Silver Award. Upon hearing the news, my heart skipped a beat — not because of medical complications but because of joy.” Venhuizen also thanked Annette Mills for help translating her story into English.
Magazine
Gold Award
Kate Evans
“The End of the Everywhere Bird”
New Zealand Geographic
May – June 2024 issue
In the opening paragraph of her award-winning entry, Kate Evans wrote that Heath Melville’s “first memory of red-billed gulls is shooting one with his slug gun when he was about seven years old. Just for something to do on a boring Kaikōura afternoon. He’d thought he might try to bag a bunch of them, but something about the dead bird moved him: the sleek white body fully alive one second, motionless the next.” Melville, now a biodiversity adviser for a regional environmental council, thus began a life-long fascination with the omnipresent gulls. And about the same time that Melville was wielding his slug gun, Jim Mills already had been monitoring the red-bill gull colony on New Zealand’s Kaikōura Peninsula for nearly 30 years. As Evans wrote, “Every fine day from October to January, starting in 1964, Jim would spend around eight hours dancing between the close-packed nests, identifying parents, counting eggs, recording laying and hatching dates. He’d capture chicks and weigh, measure and band them with a generic metal tag, marking them as Kaikōura birds — 76,285 of them over the course of the 55-year study. Mills and his collaborators amassed one of the largest avian databases in the world, revealing not only the birds’ biology and behavior but also how climate and oceanic conditions allow them to thrive — or drive them to fail. “Kate Evans’ story is a fascinating look at a common species in decline, as well as the researchers who spent their lives documenting the bird's fall,” said judge Sarah Zielinski, an editor for Science News Explores. “The reality she presents is often brutal and sad, and yet she not only makes the reader care about what is often considered a trash bird but also leaves us on a positive, hopeful note — truly masterful.” Evans said her initial feeling when asked to write the story was: What is there to write about seagulls? “Though I’m a little embarrassed about that feeling now,” Evans said, “it made me a good proxy for the reader, as I set out to show them — and myself — just how much there is to say about the birds New Zealanders dismiss as ‘beach wallpaper’ at best, and at worst actively harm them.”
Silver Award
Alec Luhn
“Why Are Alaska’s Rivers Turning Orange?”
Scientific American
January 1, 2024
In a visually striking story for Scientific American, Alec Luhn offers a harrowing look at the harmful impact climate change has had on Alaska’s Salmon River in Kobuk Valley National Park. The river was praised in John McPhee’s Coming into the Country and in a landmark 1980 conservation act for its exceptional water clarity. “Now, however,” writes Luhn, “the river is quite literally rusting” — along with at least 75 other Alaska rivers. The park has warmed by 2.4 degrees Celsius since 2006, which has led to significant permafrost thaw in the area. Luhn joined a group of scientists for a six-day packrafting trip down the Salmon to investigate how thawing permafrost is polluting the water — an endeavor he says is “crucial for understanding what the sweeping ecological impact could be and to help communities adapt.” The scientists take regular samples of the orange water, testing pH levels and electrical conductivity, which can indicate the presence of dissolved toxic metals. They find two possible mechanisms behind the orange color and high acidity. The first suggests that bedrock exposed to water for the first time in millennia is now leaching iron and possibly heavy metals, and the second posits that bacterial respiration is mobilizing iron from the soil in thawing wetlands. Similar rusting is taking place in the nearby Wulik River, writes Luhn, with one key difference — there is a Native Alaskan village at the mouth of the river that relies on it for water and fish. Discharges from one of the world’s biggest zinc mines have long raised concerns about the Wulik’s water quality, but the permafrost thaw is now a bigger polluter than the mine. The spread of these rusting rivers shows the toll climate change is having on some of the most intact ecosystems left on earth, and on indigenous peoples living there. Judge Megan Molteni, health and science writer at STAT, called the story “a gripping look at what it takes for researchers to unravel an ecological mystery with far-reaching impacts on animal and human health. Luhn skillfully conveys the ways that unforeseen consequences of climate change are continuing to emerge and surprise even seasoned scientists.” Luhn said a photograph of a bright orange river “led me to this story, but there's far more here than first meets the eye, from chemical reactions deep underground to the fishing traditions of Alaska Natives.”
VIDEO
Spot News/Feature Reporting (20 minutes or less)
Gold Award
Jesse Nichols
"This enzyme is responsible for life on Earth. It’s a hot mess."
Grist
May 16, 2024
"The Gulf Coast is home to one of the last healthy coral reefs. It’s surrounded by oil."
Grist | Science Friday
May 9, 2024
“Pretty much all life on Earth — from flowers, to trees, to animals and humans — in large part owe their entire existence to one microscopic protein,” Jesse Nichols reported in the first of his award-winning stories. That protein is an enzyme called RuBisCO, a biological machine that helps turn carbon dioxide into energy. Of the millions of enzymes on Earth, RuBisCO might be the most important, Nichols reported. “It's essential to photosynthesis, and without it plants would be unable to grow. But even though it's everywhere, and it's been around for billions of years, RuBisCO is kind of terrible at its job. And it's getting worse as the world gets hotter.” Nichols went to MIT, where scientists found a way to engineer bacteria to create and test thousands of different versions of RuBisCO in the lab. They envision futuristic plants that could produce higher yields and suck up more carbon. While it's still a long process from the lab to the field, the scientists are hoping their work might finally demonstrate that a better RuBisCO is possible. In his second story, Nichols turned to a remarkable coral reef in the Gulf of Mexico that is holding its own even as reefs around the world are bleaching at alarming rates due to climate change. The reef, called Flower Garden Banks, is surviving in an unlikely location, surrounded by offshore oil rigs. The corals grow in the cooler waters atop an underwater mountain called a salt dome, even as the same dome harbors oil and gas deposits within. Although Flower Garden Banks may outlast other coral reefs, it won’t be safe forever. Scientists predict it could start to see major bleaching events as early as 2040. The Nichols videos “offer clear explainers, surprising details, and marquee visuals,” said judge Nsikan Akpan, managing editor for Think Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They are newsworthy productions about climate change. All the judges were impressed by the project's deft touch and superb animations for the RuBisCO segment.” Jesse Nichols commented: "In this series, we set out to shine a light on people driving some of the most surprising research on climate change — combining a sense of wonder, innovation, and urgency. We are very grateful to AAAS for this award. It is a tremendous honor.”
Silver Award
Ruth Lichtman, Sharon Shattuck, Sarah Goodwin, Elliot Kirschner and Regina Sobel
“Decoding Ancestral Knowledge”
Science Communication Lab | YouTube
November 15, 2023
Ruth Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck told the captivating story of Kiana Frank, a microbiologist and proud Native Hawaiian. She intertwines traditional wisdom with the latest molecular techniques, casting light on intricate interactions between microorganisms and the environment they inhabit. “I didn’t become a scientist,” Frank said. “I was born a scientist. My kupuna, my ancestors were natural scientists.” Frank recalled an ancestral story in which a hibiscus-like plant, pua hau, turns yellow whenever a steward protector of a sacred Hawaiian fishpond relieves herself in it. Frank wondered if the tale had something to do with cycling of nitrogen, one of the most important nutrients in a fishpond. Could the allegorical peeing in the pond be associated with spikes in ammonia, an inorganic form of nitrogen? Frank and her colleagues sampled the pond water multiple times a week over the course of a year. “And every time we had blooms of pua hau, and the hau was yellow, we would see these spikes in ammonia,” Frank said. Moreover, they also saw spikes in a microbial population that was a favored food for baby fish. “I felt really strongly that I needed to pursue science as a way to protect these spaces and restore them and bring them back to these spaces of productivity,” Frank says. “I left Hawai’i because I felt like I needed to learn things to bring back home.” Janet Raloff, digital editor at Science News Explores called the winning entry “charming and thought-provoking” and said it “illustrates how ancestral stories can inspire meaningful environmental research when local scientists are clever enough to read the patterns in nature from which those ancient stories were drawn.” Ruth Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck commented: “We're so honored to receive this award; we loved working with Kiana and the people of Kauluakalana and Paepae o He'eia to bring this story to life.” The winning entry was created in collaboration with the non-profit Science Communication Lab, an organization that makes films for the public and educational audiences about the nature and process of science. Shattuck, Goodwin, Kirschner and Sobel are now two-time winners of the AAAS Kavli award.
Video In-Depth Reporting (more than 20 minutes)
Gold Award
Catherine Gale, Archie Baron, Sean B. Carroll, Cathy Houlihan and Alex Keefe
Wingspan Productions (United Kingdom) and HHMI Tangled Bank Studios in association with NOVA/GBH and ARTE France
November 15, 2023
The malaria pathogen is carried by just one percent or so of the world’s 3,500 species of mosquito, yet it is these few that are responsible for a huge amount of suffering and death. Of the more than 200 million people who fall ill with malaria every year, approximately 600,000 of them die. The vast majority are children under five years of age. A team of Oxford University scientists, many of whom worked on developing the groundbreaking AstraZeneca Covid vaccine, has developed a highly effective malaria vaccine called R21/Matrix-M. Filmed over several years, the NOVA documentary follows the Oxford scientists and their colleagues across four continents as they work towards a breakthrough, from testing and preliminary trials through the World Health Organization’s 2023 approval of the vaccine’s rollout to protect children. Judge Nsikan Akpan, managing editor for Think Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the winning entry “provides all that viewers could want from a science documentary. The behind-the-scenes production, the historical descriptions, and the clinical explanations are great, but I loved this project because of how it conveyed the agony and ecstasy of the research process.” Catherine Gale, producer/director for Wingspan Productions, said: “It was an immense privilege to be given the opportunity to film the story of the incredible team of scientists behind the development of a new malaria vaccine. Their commitment and resilience, against the odds, are deeply inspiring and their remarkable achievement serves as a powerful reminder that science can and does have the power to change, and in this case, over time save millions of lives.” Sean B. Carroll, former head of HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, is now a three-time winner and AAAS Kavli Laureate.
Silver Award
Penny Palmer, Jeff Siberry, Kirsty Walsh, Oliver Graham and Anica Berndt
“Megafauna: What Killed Australia's Giants? Episode 1”
June 25, 2024
“Megafauna: What Killed Australia's Giants? Episode 2”
July 2, 2024
Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV and ABC iview
Ice Age Australia was home to giant animals known as megafauna. Herds of wombat-like herbivores roamed vast grasslands, living alongside Procoptodons, short-faced kangaroos that may have been too massive to hop. And ruling the land were apex predators, heavily armored giant lizards called Megalania and a marsupial lion called Thylacoleo, armed with bone crushing jaws. The animals lived on the land for millions of years, but disappeared in a blink of time, the film’s narrator notes. Why? Scientists have been debating that question for more than a century. In two well-paced episodes, the ABC team followed researchers trying to crack the cold case. Possible answers include the impact of rapid climate change that altered the megafauna’s customary environment and the arrival of human hunters who may have pushed the animals toward oblivion. Researchers also are investigating whether a geological phenomenon, the flipping of Earth’s magnetic poles, weakened the planet’s protective magnetic field, allowing more radiation from space to reach the Earth’s surface with additional impact on the megafauna’s habitat. The answers will not come quickly, says Gilbert Price, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Queensland. There is no evidence yet, he says, “of anything like a mass extinction as soon as humans turn up in Australia. There’s so much more that we need to know, we just simply need more data.” Judge Janet Raloff of Science News Explores praised the video team’s use of impressive animations to show how the ancient beasts moved across the continent. The team also captured “how scientists in Australia have been applying a broad range of research disciplines — from Earth science and astronomy to biomechanics and analysis of ancient Indigenous rock drawings — to narrow down what led to the demise of these awesome critters,” Raloff said. Executive Producer Penny Palmer commented: “Megafauna was brought to life by a talented team of factual storytellers who creatively nurtured and nourished it for over two years. It’s an honor to receive this notable recognition of our work.”
Audio
Gold Award
Sandra Kanthal and Natasha Loder
BBC Radio Four – United Kingdom
March 29, 2024
BBC Producer Sandra Kanthal and Natasha Loder, Health Editor at The Economist, told a very personal story of one Colorado mother’s determination to save her daughter from a rare genetic disorder of the nervous system called Batten’s disease. Julia Vitarello raised millions of dollars through a charity she set up in the name of her daughter, Mila Makovec. Dr. Timothy Yu of Boston’s Children’s Hospital took up the challenge and developed a one-of-a-kind treatment for Mila’s specific genetic mutation. In 2018, at age seven, Mila became the one person in the world to receive the drug milasen created just for her. It stabilized her condition, but the disease had damaged her so much that she died when she was ten. Vitarello’s campaign to help others benefit from such one-off personalized medicines for very rare diseases continues, including her foundation’s collaboration with the Oxford-Harrington Rare Disease Centre as well as the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), Genomics England, and other partners. The goal is to show that customized medicines can be developed, regulated, and manufactured for a variety of rare diseases. Success will mean “making sure they are more affordable and accessible than the current generation of genetic treatments,” Loder notes. “And that could be Mila’s legacy.” Judge Tina Saey, a senior writer at Science News, said the audio broadcast “eloquently and compellingly describes the very personal and important stakes behind regulation of treatments for very rare diseases and truly personalized medicine. It is the perfect example to illustrate the wider problem.” Natasha Loder and Sandra Kanthal commented: “Some stories resonate long after they happen. And some change the world. Julia and Mila’s story felt like one of those, and it was an honor to tell it in the hope that it might help other children survive a deadly diagnosis. We are grateful to win this award and hope it draws attention to all the parents fighting to save their children from rare diseases like Mila’s.”
Silver Award
Lulu Miller, Jenn Brandel, Matt Kielty, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys and Alex Neason
Radiolab | WNYC Studios
November 17, 2023
Radiolab introduced listeners to a part of the body that had been invisible to scientists until hints of its existence appeared in 2015. It is called the interstitium, a network of fluid channels inside the tissues around our organs that scientists are just beginning to understand. The discovery came as doctors maneuvered a tiny and powerful new microscope into the interior of a narrowed bile duct. A fluorescent tracer revealed a honeycombed network of glowing holes in the wall of the duct, a wall that previously had appeared to be just a solid dark structure made of collagen. The researchers found similar patterns in collagen layers that wrap around other visceral organs in the living body — lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, pancreas — and concluded that places once thought to be solid structures are riddled with little tubes and tunnels filled with a fluid that amounts to four times the volume of blood in the body. It appears to be a body-wide system, like the nervous system or the circulatory system, and it had been totally missed in previous studies. “This little microscope goes into the body, and then opens up this whole new realm that we're just — you know, just beginning to learn about,” one of the researchers tells the Radiolab team. “Like, this is my favorite kind of technology story, where it unlocks a whole new part of our world, and literally a whole new part of ourselves that we just could not have seen otherwise.” Judge Naomi Starobin, managing editor for audio at radio station WAMU in Washington, called the Radiolab piece “an exciting, complex, connective” story. “It depicts the process of scientific discovery so beautifully. The importance of the discovery as it relates to real-world medical research comes through clearly.” Lulu Miller, co-host of Radiolab, commented: “The whole Radiolab team is ecstatic to win the AAAS Kavli award, especially for a story that braids different kinds of knowledge – Eastern and Western medicine –to reveal a hidden fluid network in the human body.” The team hopes, she said, that the research described in the winning episode will encourage “scientists across many disciplines to collaborate to better understand the human body, prevent the spread of cancer and infection, and peer through misbelief toward truth.”
Children’s Science News
Gold Award
Sarah Gottlieb
Muse magazine
April 1, 2024
Sarah Gottlieb offers a captivating look at the surprising ways primates use plants and insects for medicinal purposes in this engaging story for Muse magazine. Gottlieb opens her piece in Gabon’s Loango National Park with the story of a young chimpanzee who cuts his foot in a food fight. The chimpanzee’s mother treats the cut with a paste made from chewed-up insects. Gottlieb shares how scientist Alessandra Mascaro filmed the interaction between the mother and her child, capturing footage she suspected was the first known evidence of chimpanzees medicating with insects. Over the next 15 months, Mascaro and her team observed 19 instances of chimpanzees in the park treating themselves or other chimps in their groups. The team is still working to identify the insect species, as well as the paste’s efficacy on treated chimps. Scientists are studying similar behavior in orangutans in Borneo, writes Gottlieb, where the apes are using the plant Dracaena cantleyi to reduce inflammation on sore muscles. She also reports that many species of apes intentionally swallow a mass of leaves without chewing them to stimulate the gut and push out parasitic worms. Throughout the piece, Gottlieb uses current studies to teach kids about the scientific process. Her story “lets the curiosity of a researcher lead us into an engaging, well-paced, and unusual story grounded in solid science,” said judge Stephen Ornes, three-time AAAS Kavli winner and freelance science journalist. The judges were particularly impressed with Gottlieb’s ability to appeal to young readers. “Her writing is engaging for a children's audience, such as mentions of the school cafeteria and a metaphor using an NBA player's arm,” said judge Christine Dell’Amore, online natural history editor at National Geographic. “In other words, she thought like a kid." Sarah Gottlieb commented: “I am so honored to win this AAAS Kavli award. I love sharing with young readers how much is still out there undiscovered and showing them that even a quiet observation by a student intern can lead to a groundbreaking discovery.”
Silver Award
Lindsay Patterson, Sara Robberson Lentz and Marshall Escamilla
Tumble Science Podcast for Kids
February 2, 2024
Lindsay Patterson and the Tumble podcast team showed kids that seismology can measure more than just tectonic activity in an episode about Taylor Swift’s earth-shaking Eras Tour. The episode features Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a geophysicist who spent most of her career studying volcanoes and earthquakes. She became interested in comparing the “Beast Quake” caused by Seattle Seahawks fans during a 2011 NFL playoff game with the recorded seismic activity in the same stadium during Taylor Swift’s concerts. She breaks down her line of scientific inquiry, walking Tumble’s young listeners through the wonder and excitement of the scientific method. Caplan-Auerbach explores different factors that may be causing the “Swift-quake” and tries to isolate the source of the spike. The podcast shows children “how something that’s part of their daily lives can become a fascination and an object of study for a scientist,” said judge Jop de Vrieze, a freelance science journalist in the Netherlands. Caplan-Auerbach discovered there were “two types of ways that the ground was shaking” — high frequencies associated with the band and corresponding sound system, as well as low frequencies caused by the crowd dancing to Swift’s music. Those low frequencies are “far and away the strongest signals that we recorded,” said Caplan-Auerbach. She was even able to use videos and photos sent in by young concert goers as data to map the seismic activity with specific songs. Judge Laura Allen, freelance science journalist, called the story “a fun way to get young people interested in the scientific process. Patterson masterfully wove a pop-culture phenomenon into a real-life scientific exploration, and the bonus was including fans along the way.” Patterson, Lentz and Escamilla, who are now two-time winners, commented: “Taylor Swift may be the 'hook' of this episode, but the science is the melody. This award means that we're hitting the right notes when it comes to our mission of engaging kids in the process of science with high-quality journalism, and we are deeply honored to receive it for the second time."
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