Ari Daniel
Ari Daniel is a reporter for NPR's Science desk where he covers global health and development.
Ari has always been drawn to science and the natural world. As a graduate student, Ari trained gray seal pups (Halichoerus grypus) for his Master's degree in animal behavior at the University of St. Andrews, and helped tag wild Norwegian killer whales (Orcinus orca) for his Ph.D. in biological oceanography at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. For more than a decade, as a science reporter and multimedia producer, Ari has interviewed a species he's better equipped to understand – Homo sapiens.
Over the years, Ari has reported across five continents on science topics ranging from astronomy to zooxanthellae. His radio pieces have aired on NPR, The World, Radiolab, Here & Now, and Living on Earth. Ari formerly worked as the Senior Digital Producer at NOVA where he helped oversee the production of the show's digital video content. He is a co-recipient of the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award for his stories on glaciers and climate change in Greenland and Iceland.
In the fifth grade, Ari won the "Most Contagious Smile" award.
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A bump in the elephant brain stem pointed scientists to the wrinkles on their trunks and the role those folds play in the animal’s life.
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Research into some areas of the world that have a lot of centenarians shows that some of those people are no longer alive. Sometimes the fault is bad record-keeping and sometimes it’s outright fraud.
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Researchers found that two individuals of a type of comb jelly can fuse and become one with a shared nervous system and digestive system — which has implications for animal regeneration and immune systems.
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African farmers aren't as productive because of changing rainfall patterns. Now, an NGO and the Kenyan government are pulling together geographically precise weather data and texting it to farmers.
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New technology is making it easier to find the origins of trafficked wildlife so they can be released back to the habitat they came from, instead of languishing for decades as sometimes happens.
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When octopuses and fish hunt in groups in the Red Sea, the leadership roles are more dynamic than researchers knew — as are some ways the animals enforce cooperation.
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From pension fraud to plastic plants, this year's Ig Nobel prizes recognize science that can be lighthearted, surprising or unusual.
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There's one confirmed case. And likely hundreds more. As experts try to ID the source of the virus in Gaza, a huge vaccine effort has wrapped up stage 1 and gears up for the critical stage 2.
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How do you get a cancer patient to a center that provides treatment when the roads are not safe? That's one of the challenges facing Haiti's health-care providers. How are they doing?
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Freshwater crocodiles die every year in Australia from eating poisonous cane toads that humans introduced to the continent. Now scientists have found a way to teach the crocs to avoid the toxic toads.