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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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. -
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. -
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.
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When dinosaurs reigned some 130 million years ago, flowering plants were taking over the world. That change is sealed in ancient amber specimens on the slopes of Lebanon that Danny Azar knows so well. -
Virtuosic pianist and composer Beethoven suffered from several debilitating ailments. A new study suggests lead poisoning may be at least partly to blame. -
Hurricane Maria, which tore through Puerto Rico in 2017, also devastated a tiny nearby island that's home to hundreds of monkeys. All that destruction seems to have transformed the monkeys' society.
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Crows can count... out loud! They do so similarly to human toddlers who are learning to tally things up. A neuroscientist trained birds to produce a number of calls in response to random visual cues.
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Two skulls from ancient Egypt appear to show marks left by cancerous tumors -- and one of the skulls appears to have markings that indicate an attempt at surgery to remove them.
