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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Public health officials are hoping to reach the more than half a million Gaza children who received their first dose a few weeks back. But a shifting battlefield is making everything more challenging.
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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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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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Bats are able to consume an extraordinary amount of sugar with no ill effects. Scientists are trying to learn more about how bats do it — and whether humans can learn from their sugar response.
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Since the mid-1700s, researchers have classified life with scientific names. But some of them have problematic histories and connotations. The botanical community is trying to tackle this issue.
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A Belizean bat scientist is looking to these fuzzy, flying mammals to act as emissaries to galvanize the people of Belize to protect their forests.
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It's the 16th Bat-a-thon in Belize. Researchers think the flying mammals can teach us about warding off pathogens and managing diabetes. They trap bats in nets, draw blood ... but no bats are harmed.
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Researchers have found evidence of butchery marks on the back of an ancient armadillo-like animal, suggesting humans were in South America 20,000 years ago -- earlier than many researchers thought.