Stories
Award-winning journalism from the Showcase collection
Storygram: Maria Konnikova’s “Altered Tastes”
Maria Konnikova
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October 23, 2018
PUBLISHED BY: The New Republic ON February 15, 2016
The Best American Science and Nature Writing
The light in the room softly brightened and grew warmer, yellower, somehow more embracing. …
Storygram: Nicola Twilley’s “How the First Gravitational Waves Were Found”
Nicola Twilley
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September 11, 2018
PUBLISHED BY: The New Yorker ON February 11, 2016
The Best American Science and Nature Writing
Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. …
Never Say Die
Megan Scudellari
PUBLISHED BY: Medium ON May 7, 2014
CASW Clark/Payne
NIR BARZILAI IS 57 YEARS OLD. There are wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and his hair is turning grey. As the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, Barzilai is more interested than most of us in the process of getting older. He studies ‘super-agers’, people between the ages of 95 and 112 who have never experienced any of the four most common diseases of aging: heart disease, diabetes, cancer and cognitive decline. …
Cradle of Life
Lizzie Wade
PUBLISHED BY: Science ON October 28, 2015
American Geophysical Union
Lizzie Wade’s story about the competing scientific theories on the geological history of the Amazon won an award given by the American Geophysical Union in 2016. Wade is a Latin America correspondent, based in Mexico City, for Science. Trudging along the bank of […]
Storygram: Anna Maria Barry-Jester’s “Surviving Suicide In Wyoming”
Anna Maria Barry-Jester
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June 12, 2018
PUBLISHED BY: FiveThirtyEight ON July 13, 2016
National Academies Keck Award
Kenny Michelena is, by just about any measure, a tough guy. He was born and raised on a ranch in rural northwestern Wyoming and remembers that after class in elementary school, the bus driver would drop him off wherever he saw the family tractor, so he could go straight to work in the fields …
The Dust Detectives
Douglas Fox
PUBLISHED BY: High Country News ON December 22, 2014
American Geophysical Union
Grass on the sand dunes dawdles in a breeze. The air drifting in from the Pacific Ocean is clear and cool on this gray February morning. But Kimberly Prather is not outside inhaling its salty tang. …
Storygram: Sarah Wild’s “Bones specialists try to prise secrets from the veld bodies”
Sarah Wild
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March 20, 2018
PUBLISHED BY: Mail & Guardian ON January 20, 2017
AAAS Kavli Award
If it wasn’t for the smell, no one would know there was a body there. The savannah grass reaches above the waists of passers-by sweating under the Gauteng summer sun. …
Chasing the Higgs
Dennis Overbye
PUBLISHED BY: The New York Times ON March 5, 2013
National Academies Keck Award
Vivek Sharma missed his daughter. A professor at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Sharma had to spend months at a time away from home, coordinating a team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, here just outside Geneva. But on April 15, 2011, Meera Sharma’s 7th birthday, he flew to California for some much-needed family time. “We had a fine birthday, a beautiful day,” he recalled. Then Dr. Sharma was alerted to a blog post. There it was reported that a rival team of physicists had beaten his team to the discovery of the Higgs boson — the long-sought “God particle.” …
Storygram: Eric Boodman’s “Accidental Therapists”
Eric Boodman
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January 23, 2018
PUBLISHED BY: STAT ON March 22, 2017
CASW Clark/Payne
Gale Ridge could tell something was wrong as soon as the man walked into her office at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. He was smartly dressed in a collared shirt and slacks, but his skin didn’t look right: [highlight]It was bright pink, almost purple — and weirdly glassy. …
Storygram: Andrew Grant’s “At last, Voyager 1 slips into interstellar space”
Andrew Grant
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December 12, 2017
PUBLISHED BY: Science News ON September 12, 2013
American Geophysical Union
Humankind has officially extended its reach to the space between the stars.