Richard Fuller: Fuller, now president of the environmental health NGO Pure Earth, once helped send me on a very long reporting trip through some of the most contaminated areas of Russia, where his staff and partners were working to reverse decades of horrific pollution. The sights included Chelyabinsk, near one of the worst nuclear disasters in history; Sakhalin Island, where oil and gas drillers were clear-cutting forests; and Rudnaya Pristan in Russia's Far East, where children played in piles of lead-contaminated dirt. As a tourism itinerary, it would have been the travelog from hell, but for a young environment reporter it was an eye-opening experience that showed me the terrible toll of industrial pollution — and the heroism of people like Fuller who were doing something about it.
—Bryan Walsh
Philipp Dettmer: Not a week goes by without me clicking on Kurzgesagt's latest videos as they go up on YouTube. This week, for example, Dettmer and his team had a concise, nuanced explainer on the phenomenon of supervolcanoes and just how much of a catastrophic risk for humanity they really are. But that's par for the course for Kurzgesagt, which has quietly racked up nearly 20 million subscribers. Dettmer and his team show that even the most complicated scientific topics can be explained clearly and elegantly in the hands of a considerate communicator who, above all, wants their audience to learn. —Muizz Akhtar
Target Malaria's scientists: At first, Target Malaria sounds like a story you've heard before: big Western donors and scientists have a plan to use genetic engineering in a bid to help residents of the Global South. But that's not actually what's happening. The group is run by a team of African scientists: Drs. Jonathan Kayondo of the Uganda Virus Research Institute, Fred Aboagye-Antwi of the University of Ghana, Mamadou Coulibaly of the University of Bamako in Mali, and Abdoulaye Diabate of the Research Institute in Health Sciences in Burkina Faso. It's an African team developing a solution to a problem plaguing Africa, through extensive consultation with local communities. It's not just a promising path for ending one of humanity's greatest scourges. It's a model for how public health work can be done going forward. —Dylan Matthews
Lynne Sneddon: There's a saying that "animal welfare is really farm animal welfare," since more animals are raised for food than those used for medical research, entertainment, and clothing combined. But I'll throw a new saying into the mix: "Farm animal welfare is really fish welfare." An estimated 1-3 trillion fish and crustaceans are farmed or caught in the wild each year, much more than the 77 billion chickens, pigs, and cows raised on land. Yet the welfare of fish has largely been ignored — until recently. The shift in how we think about fish — from mindless automata to sentient creatures — is thanks in part to the pioneering work of zoologist Lynne Sneddon, on whether and how fish feel pain. That research has helped to shift consensus among her peers, and inspire a new wave of animal advocates. —Kenny Torrella
Zeynep Tufekci: At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Americans got confusing guidance on whether wearing masks would prevent the spread of the virus. Masks are effective, and journalist and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci was one of the first to report on this — and the downsides of misleading public health messaging. Throughout the pandemic Tufekci has brought her insights about human behavior to the pandemic: from masking, to ventilation, to now, the undercovered effects of long Covid. She has shown how journalists can shift public opinion and policy on the most important issues in our lives.
—Siobhan McDonough
Julia Galef: Galef has had a very busy decade since our first meeting. In 2012, I was an attendee and she was an instructor at the first retreat run by the Center for Applied Rationality, a nonprofit she co-founded, focused on teaching techniques for reasoning more effectively. She moved on in 2016, and after years of work (and hundreds of episodes on her podcast, Rationally Speaking), her major book on rationality, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, was published in 2021. She still holds that thinking clearly, and being ready to change one's mind, is essential for facing the complex and often confusing challenges in the world's future, and her own work is still focused on learning how to think better — and then teaching others.
—Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg
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