Awards: National Academies Keck Award

A ProPublica analysis shows that women who deliver at hospitals that disproportionately serve black mothers are at a higher risk of harm.

Seeking to impress both gods and humans, early state societies across the globe displayed their power by ritually killing human victims

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 …

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.” …

A couple of miles outside the town of Page, three 775-foot-tall caramel-colored smokestacks tower like sentries on the edge of northern Arizona’s sprawling red sandstone wilderness. At their base, the Navajo Generating Station, the West’s largest power-generating facility, thrums ceaselessly, like a beating heart. …

Katharina Fabricius plunged from a dive boat into the Pacific Ocean of tomorrow. She kicked through blue water until she spotted a ceramic tile attached to the bottom of a reef. A year earlier, the ecologist from the Australian Institute of Marine Science had placed this small square near a fissure in the sea floor where gas bubbles up from the earth. She hoped the next generation of baby corals would settle on it and take root. …