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 67 countries this year, and 55 percent of the more than 1,100 entries were from outside the United States.
Calli McMurray, a staff reporter for The Transmitter – an online outlet that covers neuroscience – won the Gold Award in the Small Outlet category for her story about what can happen when a scientist commits research fraud by manipulating data. She examined the impact not only on the scientist’s career, but also the profound effects it can have on others in the same laboratory who may spend years trying to replicate the falsified research, unaware that the task is futile.
Llewellyn Smith, Kelly Thomson, Robert Kirwan and Chris Schmidt won the Gold Award in the Video Spot News/Feature Reporting category for their PBS – NOVA report on the misuse of dangerous race science in clinical algorithms used to diagnose and treat patients. For many years, these algorithms incorporated equations grounded in outdated pseudoscience about racial differences. One result was the use of a corrective race factor in the algorithm used to calculate kidney function. Black patients were placed lower on lengthy waiting lists for kidney transplants while white patients with similar levels of kidney function were prioritized. This is the third time Smith has won the AAAS Kavli award.
Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto of NOTUS, a newsroom covering politics and policy in Washington, won the Silver Award in the Small Outlet category for first reporting that a “Make America Healthy Again” commission report was “rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions.” Seven of the cited sources didn’t appear to exist at all. The AAAS Kavli judges praised the initiative of the young reporters in breaking a story that major news outlets further investigated, including a finding by The Washington Post that phantom studies in the report likely were generated by an artificial intelligence program.
Max G. Levy won the Gold Award in the Magazine category for a captivating piece in Quanta, an online science magazine, about the developing field of electrostatic ecology. He lured readers in with a tale about scientist Victor Ortega-Jiménez, who stumbled onto the electrostatic properties of spider webs while playing with his 4-year-old daughter.
Isabelle Groc won the Silver Award in the Magazine category for a story in Canadian Geographic on the importance of mudflats south of Vancouver, B.C. for migrating sandpipers and the discovery that the birds were using their hairy tongues to scrape a nutrient-rich biofilm off the surface of the mudflat.
Anna Louie Sussman won the Gold Award in the Science Reporting In-Depth category for a three-part series in The New York Times on human embryos and the complex scientific, ethical and legal questions that surround them. Sussman spent two and a half years on the reporting project, which received support from the Pulitzer Center and the Alicia Patterson Foundation.
Of the 16 awards, seven went to international entrants and nine to United States entrants. There were winning entrants from Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom. The winners will receive their award plaques in a ceremony at the 2026 AAAS Annual Meeting in Phoenix in February.
“It is more important than ever that the public understand how science works, the benefits it has brought, if sometimes fitfully, and the promise it holds for a better understanding of the world in which we live,” said Sudip Parikh, CEO of AAAS and executive publisher of the Science family of journals. “These award winners have done stories that both explain and critique the scientific enterprise.” He added, “That enterprise is global, and it is noteworthy that the awards program received entries this year from 67 countries.”
Here is the list of the winners of the 2025 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards:
Science Reporting – Large Outlet
Gold Award
Marina Fridman, Rolv Christian Topdahl, Stian Espeland, Ronald Fossåskaret, Thomas Ianke and Astrid Rommetveit
“The flames of Equinor”
Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK)
August 26, 2024
Flaring is the practice of burning off the gas which comes out of the ground while drilling for oil. The World Bank has estimated that globally there are 10,000 gas flares alight at any time, resulting in an estimated amount of burned-off gas that could be used as a source of energy for all sub-Saharan Africa. Equinor, an international energy company headquartered in Norway, claims to be a world leader when it comes to curbing flaring, which releases heat-trapping carbon dioxide that is associated with climate change. But the company only reports on flaring for fields where it is an operator and not fields where it is a partner or owns a share in a project. Norwegian national broadcaster NRK undertook an ambitious project to determine how much gas flaring takes place at Equinor’s partner oil and gas fields. The reporting team used satellite imagery to locate flares and estimated that 1,403 million cubic meters of gas is burned off at fields where Equinor is a partner (compared to the 103 million cubic meters of gas released at fields where Equinor is the operator). Most of the partner flaring takes place in Angola, Libya, Azerbaijan and Argentina. On many of the drilling platforms it operates, Equinor has been recycling gas back into the system rather than burning it. “They say they flare far less than the industry average,” the story notes. “But there is a lot of flaring Equinor doesn’t talk about.” Alexandra Witze, a freelance science journalist and contributor to the news section of Nature, called NRK’s entry “a deeply reported and original investigation featuring powerful data analysis and presentations.” The NRK team commented: “We are privileged and grateful to have the resources and time to investigate climate issues and to have the freedom to criticize those in power.”
Silver Award
Tess McClure
“The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?”
The Guardian
November 28, 2024
What happens to the natural world when people disappear? Tess McClure described research by Gergana Daskalova, a specialist in global change ecology who is studying 30 villages across the Bulgarian countryside in different stages of abandonment. “Over the past half century, the global portion of people living in rural areas has decreased by almost a third,” McClure writes. “Farming is becoming increasingly industrial and concentrated. More than half of all people now live in and around cities, and that figure is expected to rise to 70% by 2050.” In the late 19th century, botanist Frederick Clements helped popularize succession theory, which holds that any disturbed landscape, left to its own devices, will follow a step-by-step progression to a “climax” state of stable equilibrium. In practice, scientists have found that humanity’s relationship to the natural world is far more complex. Human presence can help make life possible for a vast array of species. Total abandonment can sometimes have worse consequences for biodiversity than landscapes where some people remain. “To harness the full environmental possibilities offered by the great abandonment,” McClure writes, “will require changing our conception of humanity’s relationship to nature and understanding how our species can benefit ecosystems as well as harm them.” Judge Amanda Buckiewicz, a science journalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, praised McClure’s history of ecosystem management and the role of humans, for better and worse. “A great story,” she said, with a “super interesting character” in Gergana Daskalova. “I'm so honored by this award,” said Tess McClure. “My particular thanks to Gergana Daskalova, the scientist at the heart of the piece, who is an exceptional communicator of science and its ramifications for human and non-human worlds – and to the many scientists who have answered my questions with patience and generosity.”
Science Reporting – Small Outlet
Gold Award
Calli McMurray
“A scientific fraud. An investigation. A lab in recovery.”
The Transmitter
October 4, 2024
Calli McMurray described the case of a postdoc researcher at the University of California, San Diego who studied how electrical activity in the mouse hippocampus can induce a gene called NPAS4 to act in different ways in the neurons of the brain. The research resulted in a paper in Cell and an assistant professorship at the University of Utah. But UCSD trainees who tried to replicate the findings were stymied, only to learn that their former lab mate later admitted to falsifying data. McMurray described the sense of betrayal and loss of trust. As one postdoc put it, “It sucks to feel like, ‘Oh, I was not a good scientist,’ and then realize, like, ‘Oh, I was trying to do something that was just never really going to work.’” McMurray told of the pressures that can lead to falsification, fabrication or plagiarism of data. “The scientists who create new knowledge are rewarded with recognition. Jobs, funding, and sometimes awards and fame, follow,” she wrote. “Under the credit system, misconduct starts to make more sense.” C.K. Gunsalus, director of the National Center for Principled Leadership and Research Ethics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told McMurray that misconduct is not just a scientific betrayal. It is a personal one as well. “It’s very hard for a lab to recover,” Gunsalus said. Judge Geoffrey Kamadi, a freelance science journalist in Kenya, commented: “Through personal accounts of various researchers, McMurray does well to personalize this story. The reader can clearly see the disillusionment and the psychological toll brought to bear on innocent researchers who had nothing to do with the actions of one individual driven by selfish motivations to get ahead.” McMurray said most stories about scientific misconduct focus on the perpetrator. “We wanted to chronicle the emotional and existential consequences the fraud has on the bystanders,” she said. “To do that, many scientists had to talk to me about one of the hardest days of their lives. I am so grateful for their bravery and candor, and for the empathetic insight of my editor Brady Huggett.”
Silver Award
Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto
“The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist”
NOTUS
May 29, 2025
“The MAHA Report Has Been Updated With Fresh Errors”
NOTUS
May 30, 2025
Two enterprising young journalists at NOTUS, a newsroom covering politics and policy in Washington, broke the news that the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” report misinterpreted some studies and cited others that don’t exist, according to the listed authors. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his “Make America Healthy Again” commission report harnesses “gold-standard” science but Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto found that the report was “rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions.” Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all. When the NOTUS reporters reached out to epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, listed in the MAHA report as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents, Keyes told them that “the paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with. We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.” The White House dismissed the errors raised by NOTUS as “formatting issues.” A day after their first report, Kennard and Manto had a follow-up story noting that the MAHA report had been updated with fresh errors. Major news outlets such as The Washington Post credited Kennard and Manto’s reporting as they pursued the story. The two are reporting fellows for the Albritton Journalism Institute, which brings early-career reporters to Washington for a two-year fellowship and a job at NOTUS. The AAAS Kavli judges praised the initiative of the NOTUS reporters and their attention to the details of scientific publishing. Judge Alexandra Witze called the entry “an excellent quick-turn and hard-hitting look” at the MAHA document. Margaret Manto commented: "At a time when readers' attention is stretched in many directions, it's gratifying to see that an extensively reported story – even one about something as notoriously dry as scientific citations – can have an impact and hold our government accountable." Emily Kennard added: "It's been uplifting as early career journalists to see our investigative work break through the noise and encourage further reporting."
Science Reporting – In-Depth
Gold Award
Anna Louie Sussman
“What do We Owe This Cluster of Cells?”
The New York Times
March 25, 2025
“Should Human Life be Optimized?”
The New York Times
April 1, 2025
Are Embryos Property? Human Life? Neither?
The New York Times
April 8, 2025
Anna Louie Sussman opened her award-winning series with a description of her own experience with in vitro fertilization that led to the birth of her daughter. “I’m now the parent of a toddler I love more than I could have imagined and in possession of six remaining embryos, frozen and waiting for my decision on their fate,” Sussman wrote. She added, “I am also a journalist who covers reproduction, and I’ve reported on places where embryos figure prominently in ways that the public may not yet realize. Scientists are doing human embryo research that could, for instance, help prevent miscarriages. Companies are pushing the boundaries of what kind of testing can be done on embryos in the name of optimizing future lives. Embryos are at the center of divorce cases that are part property dispute, part custody battle.” In richly detailed and balanced reporting, Sussman offered no easy answers to the questions she posed. “What kind of rules should govern this research? Should businesses that profit from embryos be subject to any kind of oversight? And how should the law speak of them? Wherever embryos appear, they bring with them serious ethical and intellectual questions about what meaning or place they hold in our society. So far, the issue has not garnered much public attention.” It is possible this lack of awareness “may reflect the way abortion – which has always been a proxy for a thousand other questions about gender, social roles and autonomy – has sucked almost all the air out of the room,” Sussman wrote. But pushing the frontiers of scientific research demands a broader discussion that transcends niche communities, especially in an area that could transform the nature of reproduction, she noted. “Public engagement is even more urgent at a time of historic mistrust in science, institutions and politics as a means of reaching consensus.” Emily Chung, science journalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, said the series was captivating from the start. An image of a cluster of dividing cells that were to become Sussman’s daughter “pulled me right in,” Chung said. “From there, the series was an amazing journey connecting science, politics, ethics, law, and the human experience, including Sussman's own. The three stories are beautifully interconnected, and I learned so much.” Anna Louie Sussman commented: “Few biological entities are more fraught with potentiality, in every sense, than embryos. My editors and I sought to explore the gray areas surrounding the earliest days of human existence by looking at the embryo in multiple contexts, in hopes of starting a conversation grounded in science, bioethics, and the experiences and voices of people whose engagement with embryos can teach us something about their significance.”
Silver Award
Jelmer Mommers and Thomas Oudman
“Sound the alarm or seek better evidence: the scientific battle behind climate tipping points”
De Correspondent (The Netherlands)
November 11, 2024
Jelmer Mommers and Thomas Oudman told a story about two influential scientists who look at the same thing – climate tipping points – but draw different conclusions. They agree that global warming caused by human emissions is dangerous and both advocate drastic measures to quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero. Both conduct research on tipping points, moments when a small change can make a big difference as a natural system crosses a boundary and changes irreversibly. Max Rietkerk, a Dutch professor of spatial ecology and climate change, studies tipping points between savanna and desert in the Sahel region of Africa. Tim Lenton, a British professor of climate science and earth system sciences, is a co-author of almost all the major studies on climate tipping points in the past two decades. In 2018, two of Rietkerk’s doctoral students ran a new computerized climate model that, as Mommers and Oudman wrote, “showed no tipping point, but 50 shades of gray between green savanna and arid climate hell. Everything Rietkerk thought he knew about tipping points was suddenly thrown into disarray.” Since then, Lenton and Rietkerk have been studying melting ice caps, slowing ocean currents and encroaching deserts but disagreeing on whether tipping points are imminent. Lenton believes we will soon pass certain tipping points while Rietkerk remains uncertain and, fearing alarmism, urges more research before warning about tipping points. Lenton, who also advocates for more research, says enough is known about tipping points to emphasize their “existential” dangers. Mommers and Oudman spent a year talking to Lenton, Rietkerk and other researchers to describe what is known and what is still in doubt about tipping points and why two scientists can reach such different conclusions. Judge Serena Renner, an environmental journalist and editor, called the winning story “a surprising, nuanced piece about a big idea that’s caught on in climate science – tipping points – and how the alarm bells might not be as warranted as we thought.” She added, “This story is engaging, philosophical, and aided by helpful infographics and character profiles.” Jelmer Mommers and Thomas Oudman thanked the judging committee “for highlighting our story internationally. Our purpose was to understand what tipping points in ecology and climate really are, but in the process we learned perhaps even more important lessons about the value of diverse perspectives in science.”
Magazine
Gold Award
Max G. Levy
“The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology”
Quanta
September 30, 2024
Insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more, Max G. Levy explained in his look at the developing field of electrostatic ecology. Víctor Ortega-Jiménez of the University of California, Berkeley, stumbled onto electrostatics in 2012 while playing with his 4-year-old daughter. They were using a toy wand that gathers static charge to levitate lightweight objects such as balloons. When they decided to test the wand outdoors, Ortega-Jiménez’s daughter put the wand close to a spiderweb. The wand attracted the web and the scientist “immediately began to draw connections to his research about the strange ways insects interact with their environments,” Levy wrote. Ortega-Jiménez realized that a spiderweb might not just be a passive trap. It could move toward and attract its prey electrostatically. Daniel Robert, a sensory ecologist at University of Bristol in England, has studied electrostatic sense in bees, spiders, ticks, butterflies and more. “A few years after Ortega-Jiménez noticed spiderwebs nabbing bugs, Robert’s team found that bees can gather negatively charged pollen without brushing up against it,” Levy wrote. “When a bee drank nectar from a flower, the pollen shot right onto its body.” There was no contact needed between the bee and the flower for the pollen to jump the gap. Robert has even found that the charged relationship between air and insects goes both ways. “Honeybee swarms shed so many negative charges that they alter the electrical gradients around them,” Levy noted. “Based on Robert’s estimates, the atmospheric charge resulting from a swarm of desert locusts rivals that of clouds and electrical storms.” Studying electrostatic ecology requires patience and ingenuity. Sam England, a member of Robert’s research team, wanted to test whether Lepidoptera, the order of flying insects that includes butterflies and moths, build up enough static during flight to collect pollen from the flowers they visit. He tied little lassos of fishing line around the insects’ waists and coaxed them through a metal loop to measure their charge. Some had charges of around 5 kilovolts per meter, enough to yank negatively charged pollen from 6 millimeters away. The judges praised the clarity of Levy’s writing and the appealing illustrations. “Vivid characters – human and insect – bring the scientific process to life in this deeply researched, exquisitely crafted story about an unseen force of nature,” said judge Deborah Nelson, professor of investigative journalism at the University of Maryland. Max G. Levy commented: “The more I report on science and nature, the more I marvel at how little we know. Stories like these are often the most humbling to research and write. Yet they're always so satisfying. I'm so grateful to publishers who let journalists bring readers on that curious adventure with us, and to AAAS and The Kavli Foundation for recognizing our work.”
Silver Award
Isabelle Groc
“The magic in the mud: sandpipers’ migration superfood”
Canadian Geographic
February 21, 2025
Western sandpipers, tiny but durable shorebirds, migrate thousands of miles each year from their overwintering areas as far south as Peru to their breeding grounds in Alaska. They stop at just a handful of places along the way, including the Roberts Bank mudflats about 22 miles south of Vancouver, British Columbia. Isabelle Groc wrote about the importance of the Roberts Bank stopover, both as a fueling station and rest area for the birds. She also described the threat that a proposed second container ship terminal at Roberts Bank poses for not only the sandpipers but for Pacific dunlin, Pacific salmon and southern resident orcas as well. But why is the mudflat, a brown wasteland to the casual observer, so crucial? It is estimated that almost every western sandpiper will use the site at least once in its lifetime. Groc described the research of Robert Elner, a scientist emeritus with Environment and Climate Change Canada. While the sandpipers were constantly pecking the surface of the mudflat, Elner could find no evidence of prey such as small crabs, shrimp, clams and earthworms, in their stomachs. A colleague in France found the birds had unusually hairy tongues, and Elner realized they were using their tongues to scrape a nutrient-rich biofilm – a sticky layer of bacteria and algae – off the surface of the mudflat. “Elner and his colleagues figured out that the sandpipers use the biofilm as a special energy drink to power their extreme migration, just like marathon runners,” Groc wrote. Judge Catherine Edwards, an audio producer formerly with the BBC, said Groc “did a fantastic job of imbuing these mudflats with a sense of wonder. This piece was clear, engaging, and powerful, as it led us from the inkling that there was more to the mudflats than meets the eye, to the surprising discoveries about their critical importance for sandpipers.” Isabelle Groc said: “I wanted to write this story because mudflats are so often misunderstood and dismissed as wastelands, leaving them vulnerable to destruction. In reality, they are rich, productive ecosystems that feed shorebirds, sustain entire food webs, and ultimately benefit people.”
VIDEO
Spot News/Feature Reporting (20 minutes or less)
Gold Award
Llewellyn Smith, Kelly Thomson, Robert Kirwan and Chris Schmidt
“When Machines Prescribe”
PBS - NOVA
April 30, 2025
Llewellyn Smith, Kelly Thomson, Robert Kirwan and Chris Schmidt reported on the use of clinical algorithms that incorporated equations grounded in outdated pseudoscience about racial differences. Gregory Mumford was one of many Black patients who was treated using these medical algorithms. Mumford was put on dialysis for loss of kidney function and told he would likely be on the waitlist for three or four years before he would be considered for a kidney transplant. Using the same clinical algorithm, a white patient with Mumford’s same test results would have qualified for an immediate kidney transplant evaluation. The basis for this disparity dates to a 1999 study that compared estimated kidney function with levels of creatinine, a waste product produced by muscles that the kidneys normally filter out of the blood. The researchers found the Black participants had higher levels of creatinine for the same estimated kidney function. Without further investigation, they accounted for this difference with the unsubstantiated claim that “black persons have greater muscle mass than white persons,” despite the fact that creatinine can also increase due to factors like diet, medication and dehydration. The paper led to the addition of a corrective race factor in the clinical algorithm used to calculate kidney function. “Now, instead of showing the true function of their kidneys,” Smith noted, “the equation calculated that Black patients’ kidneys were healthier than they really were.” In 2019, Dr. Amaka Eneanya, a nephrologist at Emory Healthcare, published a paper picking apart the flawed clinical algorithm and exposing the serious harm it was causing Black patients. Researchers began finding similar corrective factors embedded in many other clinical algorithms – in guidelines for treating high blood pressure, measuring osteoporosis, and calculating risk for vaginal births after C-sections. In 2020, Dr. Darshali Vyas, then a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, and her colleagues published a paper investigating the use of race correction in clinical algorithms. The paper prompted the creation of a task force from the National Kidney Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology and the mandated removal of racially motivated corrective factors from the kidney function clinical algorithms nationwide. The change meant more than 14,000 Black patients had their kidney transplant wait time corrected to reflect the true severity of their disease – including Gregory Mumford, who jumped to the top of the list and received his transplant. The story “packs an impressive amount of material into a small package,” said judge Stephen Ornes, a freelance science journalist. “It's economical and engaging in its storytelling, and it weaves together patient narratives, expert voices, and rigorous evidence to take viewers through an urgent and pressing narrative that deftly unpacks tricky scientific ideas, the limitations of measurements, and biases built into algorithms.” Correspondent Llewellyn Smith said making the film “required multiple collaborators: the brilliant NOVA team; our own production ‘dream team’; Gregory and Pipier Mumford, who showed us the human consequences of flawed, race-driven medical science; and the dedicated medical professionals who walked us carefully again and again through complex medicine and research history, to make sure we got it right.”
Silver Award
Adam Cole
“How dangerous could one beer be?”
Howtown
January 10, 2025
In 1991, the CBS program “60 Minutes” ran a segment suggesting that a glass of wine is good for your health. But in 2023, the World Health Organization issued a statement warning that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health.” “So, what’s going on?” asked Howtown video narrators Adam Cole and Joss Fong. “Is moderate drinking good or bad?” They started by unpacking the longstanding myth that a glass of wine can reduce mortality. Although many studies suggest that non-drinkers have higher mortality rates than those who consume one to two drinks a day, the data are skewed by the study design, said Tanya Chikritzhs, leader of the Alcohol Policy Research team at the National Drug Research Institute in Australia. The “non-drinkers” group also includes “ex-drinkers,” she said, and ex-drinkers tend to be unhealthier due to their years of alcohol consumption. Some studies also failed to fully control for socio-economic status, which can play a major role in mortality rates. Research suggests there may be a disproportionate number of high-income people in the “moderate drinkers” group. “And there’s lots of ways being rich can help your health,” said Cole. “More time for exercise, access to better doctors, better medicine, better food, less exposure to pollution.” Put it all together, said Cole, “and you don’t see any net benefit from drinking.” Still, proving causation requires a shift from observational studies. One group of researchers attempted a randomized trial in 2015 but were shut down after The New York Times exposed coercion from the alcohol industry. Other researchers turned to Mendelian randomization — a method that looks for genes that predispose drinking habits. A paper out of Princeton University focused on the completely random “flushing gene” mutation, which causes an unpleasant reaction to alcohol. The researchers found that genetically predicted increases in drinking led to worse heart health, even at lower doses. To answer their titular question, Cole and Fong tied together all these studies to consider the risk of drinking in perspective. They found that health risk increases as drinking increases, but in low numbers the risk stays low. So how dangerous is one beer? “We need more good data,” said Cole, “but there’s growing agreement that even a little bit of alcohol can increase your risk of cancer and other diseases. But at moderate doses, it doesn’t increase that risk by that much.” Judge Jesse Nichols, a freelance video producer, called the video a “refreshingly responsible look at the health impacts of alcohol and the limits of what science can currently tell us. Cole uses fun, informative visuals to illustrate how subtle differences in study design can lead to seemingly contradictory results.” Adam Cole said he and Joss Fong started Howtown in 2024 as “an independent YouTube channel that aims to convey the complexity and uncertainty inherent in science, while still helping people better understand the world and their decisions. This award gives us a big boost as we continue down that trail.”
Video In-Depth Reporting (more than 20 minutes)
Gold Award
Gregor Čavlović, Derek Muller and Zoe Heron
“How One Company Secretly Poisoned The Planet”
Veritasium
May 14, 2025
In 1936, the DuPont chemical company set out to find a safer alternative to the gases used in refrigerators, one that was neither toxic nor flammable. In the process of solving the problem, the company accidentally created a substance called Teflon that was to be incorporated into a huge range of products, from non-stick cookware to gaskets and pipe sealants in nuclear facilities. Chemicals associated with Teflon manufacture, including so-called “forever” chemicals such as PFAS, have been released into the environment and are “slowly poisoning everyone on the planet, including me,” said narrator Derek Muller, the Australia-based founder of the Veritasium YouTube site. He and Zoe Heron are executive producers of the film and Gregor Čavlović, producer, director and co-writer, also helped narrate the film. Using publicly available documents, recordings and third-party opinions, the filmmakers painstakingly described the chemistry behind the discovery and use of Teflon. Regarding one chemical called C8, an independent science panel confirmed a probable link with six human diseases, including thyroid disease, testicular cancer and kidney cancer. After determining that one part per billion of C8 in water would be unsafe for humans to drink, DuPont found 1,600 parts per billion in wastewater it was releasing into a West Virginia creek. They didn’t tell anybody. “Even though companies knew how dangerous these chemicals were 50 years ago, they decided not to inform the public and the regulators,” Muller said. As part of their, reporting, Čavlović and Muller were themselves tested for levels of PFAS in their blood. “The combined sum of all the PFAS detected in my blood was 17.92 parts per billion, more than double the U.S. median,” Muller said. The film describes possible routes of exposure, steps to reduce risks, and belated efforts by regulators to ban or sharply reduce use of the chemicals. “I've heard a lot about PFAS, but I don't think I've encountered a story that integrates so many different fields of science like this piece did,” said Judge Jesse Nichols, a freelance video producer. “It did an excellent job weaving together science history, actual chemistry, and so much more to give me a really nuanced understanding that I haven't gotten elsewhere.” Speaking for the team, Gregor Čavlović said: “The more we dug into this story, the more we realized just how huge and complicated the PFAS problem really is. It took an amazing effort from everyone at Veritasium to bring it to life. So, this award belongs to the whole team and every person who helped make this project happen.”
Silver Award
Cosima Dannoritzer
“Sense of Smell: In Search of the Lost Meaning”
Découpages and Galaxie, producers, for ARTE.tv (France)
February 8, 2025
The sense of smell in dogs is legendary, but humans can detect various odorants at the parts per trillion range. While not as good as a dog, we are much better than we think, Cosima Dannoritzer recounts in her winning video. For instance, our two nostrils work in stereo, just like our ears, allowing a precise localization of a smell in space. The film explores the extraordinary capacity, versatility and crucial role of the human sense of smell. When we lose that sense, we lose an invisible but essential connection with the world around us. Many COVID-19 patients have experienced this firsthand, but scientists are looking for ways to help them recover their joy of smell. Smell training can help. For severe cases of loss, experiments are under way. After electrical stimulation of the olfactory bulb and the primary olfactory cortex in the brain, one patient managed to pick up the smell of spinach. A small but promising step. Researchers also are finding that odors are essential to the creation of our inner lives and memories, and play a key role in our social interactions. The film describes experiments suggesting that the more humans are similar in body odor, the more they tend to like each other. When researchers asked male volunteers to rate the attractiveness of female smell samples, they found that the women who consistently obtained the highest ratings had one thing in common: they had the highest level of estrogen and the lowest of progesterone. Through analyses at the molecular level, scientists are beginning to glimpse some of the mysteries of odors and how they convey their messages. Judge Rich Monastersky, chief features editor for Nature, said the film “presents a huge range of experiments and findings related to research on how smell works, how this sense is lost and how it might be recovered. It does an admirable job of showing the methods of science and does so in an engaging manner.” Cosima Dannoritzer commented: “I had the support of a great team and would like to thank my producers and our broadcaster ARTE for doing such a wonderful job of ensuring the presence of quality science on public television.” She also thanked “the inspiring and dedicated community of smell scientists around the world who generously opened the doors of their labs – and their scent flasks – to show us how central the human sense of smell is to pretty much every single aspect our lives. Follow your nose, it’s always right.”
Audio
Gold Award
Flora Lichtman, Annette Heist, Pajau Vangay and David Sanford
"The Leap" series on Science Friday | A production of the Hypothesis Fund
“I Was Considered A Nobody” May 12, 2025
“The Volcano Whisperer” May 19, 2025
“Garbage In, Garbage Out” June 16, 2025
The winning audio series, “The Leap,” profiled scientists willing to take big risks to push the boundaries of discovery. As host Flora Lichtman noted, “Each episode is an intimate profile of a scientist who was, or in some cases, is, out on a limb, pursuing their most daring idea, even if it’s risky or unpopular.” But, she says, “sometimes those bold ideas can change the world.” Biochemist Katalin Karikó spent decades at the University of Pennsylvania experimenting with mRNA, convinced that she could solve the problems that had kept it from being used as a therapeutic. Her methodical work was essentially dismissed by her colleagues. As she told Lichtman, “I know that Penn is a very prestigious place. But I was considered nobody there. They thought that I am crazy. They questioned my quality as a scientist.” Her work – for which she won a Nobel Prize in 2023 – laid the foundation for rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines that saved millions of lives. Another episode described the scientific and community impact of West Indian volcanologist Richard Robertson, who as a teenager living in St. Vincent, experienced first-hand what a volcanic eruption did to life on the island. Forty years later, he was the scientist the community turned to when the same volcano roared back to life. Stacey Edwards of the UWI Seismic Research Centre, a colleague of Robertson, told how he earned the trust of the community, and why it was important to have a Vincentian leading the way in a crisis. An episode on the work of biochemist Virginia Man-Yee Lee explained her lifetime of trying to figure out what happens in the brains of people with neurodegenerative diseases. She has made key discoveries about Parkinson’s, ALS, and Alzheimer’s. She describes happiness as the key to her success. “If you’re not happy,“ Lee said, “you don’t know what you’re capable of.” Judge Lindsay Patterson, creator and co-host of a podcast series for children, said the winning entry’s diversity of stories and people “just connects with the bigger picture of science in a really refreshing way that feels essential right now.” Host Flora Lichtman said she was “grateful to the scientists we profiled — who opened their homes to us, shared personal stories, trusted us with family and friends and in doing so gave listeners a sense of the bravery and creativity required to do something new.” David Sanford of the Hypothesis Fund, producer of the series, added: “We hope that these stories inspire scientists and nonscientists alike, by revealing what it takes to make a huge leap – and the humanity, passion, and drama involved in the search for truth.”
Silver Award
Ben Motley and Anand Jagatia
“CrowdScience: Is anything truly random?”
BBC World Service
February 14, 2025
The BBC’s “CrowdScience” program invites listeners to ask a question that the broadcasters can answer. Some are more difficult than others. Dorit, a Canadian currently living in Austria, asked: “Is anything really random? And what is randomness?” It turns out she wanted help decorating her bathroom with a truly random pattern of floor tiles. The floor tiler tried several times, but Dorit kept seeing what appeared to be patterns. “You might think you have an intuitive sense of whether something is random or not, but as Dorit learned for herself after her fiasco with the tiler, that only gets you so far,” host Anand Jagatia told his listeners. “If this home improvement project is going to succeed, we need to seek the help of a certified professional. A mathematician.” The CrowdScience team proceeded to take listeners on a lively, often funny journey into the world of randomness. Hugo Duminil-Copin, a professor at the University of Geneva and winner of the Fields Medal for his work on probability, was game. He invited Jagatia to flip an imaginary coin 25 times and write down the sequence of heads and tails. In guessing the sequence, Duminil-Copin got just 7 wrong out of 25. Turns out Jagatia had refrained from picking four heads or four tails in a row, figuring it was improbable that such a sequence would occur in a real coin toss. Duminil-Copin said just such reluctance makes it easier for him to guess the probabilities. “Hugo's magic trick, or demonstration of probability, shows us that our intuition about randomness is often totally wrong,” Jagatia said. “Which explains why, in the parable of Dorit and the tiler, both parties were doomed to fail. It would have been really difficult for either of them to make up a pattern that really was random. But this brings us to another weird thing about randomness. Even if one of them had come up with something genuinely random, it probably wouldn’t have looked random to the other.” To generate a truly random pattern, and to work out whether that's even physically possible, Jagatia said, “We have to understand what randomness actually is.” For that, he visited physicists at the University of Geneva to learn how they can detect the truly random behavior of photons in the weird quantum world of the atom. Judge Larry Engel, a professor of film and media arts at American University, praised the humorous but well-researched and produced CrowdScience program. “This marvelous report makes me wonder,” Engel said, “and creating wonder or curiosity in someone is a sign of excellent science communication.” Ben Motley commented: “We are absolutely thrilled to win this AAAS Kavli award, especially as it’s a story that sums up what CrowdScience does best – starting with a relatively straightforward question from a listener, taking it on an audio adventure and making science accessible.”
Children’s Science News
Gold Award
Avery Elizabeth Hurt
“Are plants intelligent? It seems to depend on how you define it”
Science News Explores
November 21, 2024
Research suggests that plants can communicate threats, recognize close kin, and adapt their responses to danger – but are they intelligent? In her winning story for Science News Explores, Avery Elizabeth Hurt talked to researchers “working to get to the root of what’s going on when plants act in ways we once thought only animals could.” Scientists first observed plants communicating with each other in the 1980s, wrote Hurt. Two young researchers at Dartmouth College noticed that a damaged tree sent signals through the air to other trees prompting them to release a chemical to repel attackers. More recent work from the University of California, Davis suggests that plants will respond even better to messages from their close kin. Some plants communicate with other species, like hornworms, and others show proficiencies in different “languages” said Hurt. And in 2014, scientists found that the Mimosa pudica plants can learn and adapt their reaction to different threats. Hurt painted an exciting picture of plant science for her young readers, but she took her story further by exploring whether this research means plants are capable of intelligence. Plants do not have brains or nervous systems. Instead, neurotransmitters can move around their bodies through a series of tubes called xylem and phloem. Plants can process sophisticated information but not like us. Hurt wrote that “the problem may trace to how we define words like ‘thinking” and ‘intelligence.’” She spoke to several plant scientists, who hold varying opinions on “plant intelligence theory” – how do we measure and define intelligence? And does it even matter? “However you describe it,” concluded Hurt, “scientists are learning that plants are far more amazing than most people realize. And to amaze us, they don’t have to be like us.” Judge Kendra Pierre-Louis, a freelance climate journalist, called the story “really well written,” noting Hurt’s “good use of visuals and other materials.” Avery Hurt commented: “I am honored to receive this award, particularly for this story. It validates the importance of serious science writing for young readers, who can think deeply and engage with complex and nuanced ideas. I’m grateful to Janet Raloff and the team at Science News Explores for creating a publication that respects young readers’ intelligence as well as their curiosity.”
Silver Award
Júlia Dias Carneiro and Allyson Shaw
“Amazon Adventure”
National Geographic Kids
November 1, 2024
South America’s Amazon River flows 4,000 miles long and is home to about three million species of plants and animals, writes Julia Dias Carneiro in her winning story for National Geographic Kids. “Amazon Adventure” highlights the research of four scientists working to study and conserve some of these species as part of the National Geographic Society’s Perpetual Amazon Expedition. Carneiro shares these projects with readers in the form of imagined journal entries from each scientist – complete with vibrant on-the-scene photography and fun science facts about the ecosystems of the Amazon. First Carneiro takes readers to the cloud forest in Peru’s Andes Mountains, where Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya tracks Andean bears with her dog Ukuku. Huarcaya collects bear scat to bring back to her lab at the Wayqecha Biological Station to study how the bears are adding to the cloud forest vegetation by spreading seeds through their scat. On the Juruá River that feeds into the Amazon, João Campos-Silva counts black caiman, a large crocodilian. In his journal entry, he recounts the time his boat capsized, a startling adventure that plunged him into the water with the Amazon River’s largest predator. In Colombia, Fernando Trujillo dives with dolphins in a lagoon near the Guaviare River, another river that links to the Amazon. While studying a family of Amazon River dolphins, Trujillo’s lucky bandana falls off – and is returned to the surface by one of the pink river dolphins. And along Brazil’s Juruá River, Andressa Bárbara Scabin is rehabilitating and releasing turtle hatchlings. On release day, volunteers introduced 50,000 healthy hatchlings onto the riverbank. “The field notebook style is very accessible for kids,” said judge Christine Dell’Amore, Deputy Editor in Chief, of Chemical & Engineering News. “The writing is clear and simple. The whole package is very engaging.” Júlia Dias Carneiro and Allyson Shaw commented: “It was an honor to highlight the hard work of the scientists, conservationists, and National Geographic Explorers working alongside local communities to protect the imperiled Amazon River. We hope our young readers will feel the thrill of exploration, grasp the magnitude of this ecosystem with its complexity and frailty, and be buoyed by the optimism of seeing conservation success. Writing the piece was its own wonderful adventure.”
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